alt Hacker NewsI wonder if the sea people were just displaced-farmers-turned-raiders that created some open loop feedback that in turn spawned more sea people in self defence or self survival.
The mythological idea of them just appearing out of nowhere is nice too. Makes it feel aligned with something like the pyramids having no explanation
Replies
The Fall of Civilizations Podcast (nice one) had an episode on this topic.
According to it, the sea peoples could instead be vast numbers of western europeans fleeing the outcome of a massive volcanic eruption in Iceland, which would have triggered crop failures and mass starvation in western and northern europe.
A significant portion of the survivors would have fled en masse to the richer eastern Mediterranean empires, thereby causing their downfall.
They probably never existed in the first place. Most of the evidence for the “Sea People” story is extremely tenuous. Those maps you’ve seen with lots of cities burnt down? Bogus. Often it is really just one burnt down building in a village or town that looks like it might date to approximately the right century. The maps also cherry–pick the data by showing all the towns that they count as burned down wile ignoring the far larger population that were not, and by obscuring the fact that these fires were spread out over such a long period of time.
you may not be far off; iirc evidence suggests a mix of cultures, like the invaders picked up other peoples along the way
Hasn’t that been the primary hypothesis for a while?
Them essentially being refugees / displaced and looking for a new place, not them being spawned on the map like a cheap rts scenario.