The Sea Peoples, from Cuneiform Tablets to Carbon Dating

Abstract

The 13th century BC witnessed the zenith of the Aegean and Eastern Mediterranean civilizations which declined at the end of the Bronze Age, ∼3200 years ago. Weakening of this ancient flourishing Mediterranean world shifted the political and economic centres of gravity away from the Levant towards Classical Greece and Rome, and led, in the long term, to the emergence of the modern western civilizations. Textual evidence from cuneiform tablets and Egyptian reliefs from the New Kingdom relate that seafaring tribes, the Sea Peoples, were the final catalyst that put the fall of cities and states in motion. However, the lack of a stratified radiocarbon-based archaeology for the Sea People event has led to a floating historical chronology derived from a variety of sources spanning dispersed areas. Here, we report a stratified radiocarbon-based archaeology with anchor points in ancient epigraphic-literary sources, Hittite-Levantine-Egyptian kings and astronomical observations to precisely date the Sea People event. By confronting historical and science-based archaeology, we establish an absolute age range of 1192–1190 BC for terminal destructions and cultural collapse in the northern Levant. This radiocarbon-based archaeology has far-reaching implications for the wider Mediterranean, where an elaborate network of international relations and commercial activities are intertwined with the history of civilizations.

Absolute Dating of the Late Bronze to Iron Age Transition and the Appearance of Philistine Culture in Qubur el-Walaydah, Southern Levant

“…The best modeled transition between Strata 1-5a and 1-4 ranges between 1140 and 1095 BC at ±1σ confidence level. Since Stratum 1-5c contains an LH IIIC bowl associated (Kaniewski et al 2011). …”

Distinguishing the co-ancestries of haplogroup G Y-chromosomes in the populations of Europe and the Caucasus

“…The presence of M527 in Provence, southern Italy and Ukraine may reflect subsequent Greek maritime Iron Age colonization events 16 and perhaps, given its appearance among the Druze and Palestinians, even episodes associated with the enigmatic marauding Sea Peoples. 42 The hg G2a3b1c-L497 sub-cluster, on the other hand, has so far been found essentially in European populations and therefore is probably autochthonous to Europe. While acknowledging that the inference of the age and geographic source of dispersals of Y chromosome haplogroups from the frequency and STR diversity data can be approximate at best, we speculate that this lineage could potentially be associated with the Linearbandkeramik (LBK) culture of Central Europe, as its highest frequency (3.4-5.1%) and Td estimate (Supplementary Table S4) of 10 870 ± 3029 years ago occur there.…”

Environmental Roots of the Late Bronze Age Crisis

“…1200 BC, with population migrations and wars. From this crisis arose new societies and new ideologies [22].…”

“…Some scholars are even uncertain whether the Sea People’s existence was a cause or an effect of the decline of the LBA. Recent studies [12], [22] have suggested that the Sea People raids were the final step in a long and complex spiral of decline in the Eastern Mediterranean world, and that this unstable period was, at least partly, related to environmental causes operating over sizable areas. A climate shift, centred on the 13 th –9 th centuries BC, could not be without consequences on Eastern Mediterranean and West Asian environments where dry farming agro-production, pastoral nomadism and fishing were the primary or secondary subsistence systems.…”

“…Reduced precipitation probably affected the outlying nomad habitats, and led rain-fed cereal agriculturalists to habitat-tracking when agro-innovations are not available [8], [45]–[46]. According to this theory, the enigmatic Sea Peoples were not a bunch of pirates merely in pursuit of the richness of the Near East, but they rather constituted a set of ethnic entities fleeing inhospitable regions to conquer new lands, already undermined by the widespread drought [22].…”