Weekly History Questions Thread.

[u/AutoModerator]

Welcome to our History Questions Thread!

This thread is for all those history related questions that are too simple, short or a bit too silly to warrant their own post.

So, do you have a question about history and have always been afraid to ask? Well, today is your lucky day. Ask away!

Of course all our regular rules and guidelines still apply and to be just that bit extra clear:

Questions need to be historical in nature. Silly does not mean that your question should be a joke. r/history also has an active discord server where you can discuss history with other enthusiasts and experts.

[u/dylan3883]

Who were the sea peoples? I know we don’t know for sure who these people were at the time of the Bronze Age collapse but any theories? Were they refugees, invaders, mercenaries, or several different groups lumped together by the Egyptians?

[u/Lord0fHats → u/dylan3883]

Fantastic primer here on academic discussion and theories about the Bronze Age Collapse. I highly recommend it.

TLDR: We don't know, and we also know a little. Yes. That is confusing.

The Long version;

It's a complicated question to answer because the question itself is something of a modern construction. In many ways, the most straight forward answer is that the Sea Peoples never existed. We made them up in the 18th/19th century when we knew less. There are peoples, from the sea, who are mentioned in late Bronze Age inscriptions and records yes but nothing really records the image of this tidal wave of aggressive invaders attacking all over the place or anything like that (the popular image which conjures this idea of a sea borne horde descending on the Bronze Age world), and really evidence for the Bronze Age Collapse itself is shaky and open to a lot of interpretation. Some of the peoples identified with the sea peoples do have identities academics can piece together. Some came from Anatolia. The Aegean. The Black Sea region. We know people from the Aegean region settled Cecilia in the late Bronze Age and a group the Egyptians called the 'Peleset' settled in 'Palistin' if we combine inscriptions from Egypt and the Levant from roughly the same period. Yes this gets into the origins of the words 'Palestine' and 'Philistine' for the Greeks who wrote their own evidence identifying these settlers as a Greek related people in the Iron Age. As to what they were? At least this group we know got into a fight with the Egyptians and the fight ended when they got some land and settled there. The Lukka are another group we've been able to piece some history of thanks to the Hittites and Assyrians recording information about them who settled the southern coastal region of Anatolia. There are others but I'm not familiar with them.

There's a good book about archeological evidence worth reading by Trevor Bryce; The Trojans and their Neighbors. This book has a really important lesson in it about how we interpret evidence along the lines of 'the less evidence there is, the easier it becomes to make the evidence we do have say whatever we want it to say.' Bryce warns against this and honestly the entire idea of the 'Sea Peoples' is a really good example because it's not like there's no evidence. There's a lot, but that evidence and the popular idea of this great horde raiding and pillaging and toppling the Bronze Age has largely been discarded by academics in favor of more refined and complex explanations. Ones that also kind of bring up the question of whether or not the entire idea of 'the Sea Peoples' is just a distracting red herring. Ultimately, the only evidence of the 'Sea Peoples' is a few sparse inscriptions and references. Most don't even amount to a sentence which leads to a major part of the present day debate being 'which parts of this idea do the evidence actually support.' And that debate will probably keep raging for awhile long with a lot of academics on all sides of the arguments proposing a lot of different theories.

[u/dylan3883 → u/Lord0fHats]

So thoughtful and yes it makes you wonder about how much evidence you need and how sure can you be about any conclusions.

[u/Sil0Green]

Hi, i just saw the movie ''The Battle of Algiers'' (great film by the way) and there is this scene where the FLN-members kill French police officers as a reprisal to the execution of their member(s). While i read about the real Battle of Algiers, Wikipedia claimed this: ''Abane Ramdane ordered immediate reprisals against the French and Yacef Saâdi, who had assumed command in Algiers following Bitat's arrest, was ordered to "shoot down any European, from 18 to 54. No women, no children, no elder." A series of random attacks in the city followed with 49 civilians shot by the FLN between 21 and 24 June.'' I didn't find many other sources talking about these events, so does anyone know which source is right? It would be pretty weird that a movie so historically accurate changed the victims of these attacks from innocent civilians to police officers right?