Ep. 2 - I famigerati Popoli del Mare

During the campaign of Egypt between 1798 and 1801, Napoleon, on the good side, brought with him a group of archaeologists and historians of the art to study, and in many cases to collect, the works of the ancient Egyptians that he would have crossed during the military campaign. Among them there was also Vivan Denon, a member of a small noble family of the Burgundy, not the former director of the Louvre Museum. In the three years after Napoleon, Denon filled a box of notes, drawings and notes that once published contributed to spread the fascination for the Egyptian world in European bourgeoisie. During one of his expeditions, almost distractedly, Denon noticed that in a lost village at the periphery of Luxor, Medinetabu, at the foot of a mountain, there was a huge palace built and enlarged at different times. The lower part is surely the oldest, given that it is covered with hieroglyphs. Without knowing it, Denon was the first modern man to describe one of the most important details to understand what happened to the Mediterranean civilization at the end of the Bronze Age. I am Luca Misculin and this is the end of the world. The palace described by Denon was excavated in a professional way from the middle of the eighteenth century. It was discovered that it was a temple dedicated to Ramses III, a pharaoh between 1186 and 1155 BC and considered the last sovereign of the Kingdom of Egypt at the apex of its power. In one of the closest walls to the entrance to the temple, carved on the stone, a huge lioness shows a scene that we could define as the Game of Thrones. Hundreds of soldiers of two opposite skirmishes, which on board wide ships, shatter arrows and tear the bodies of the enemies apart. Friends shatter to the left half-dead at the bottom. It is not a battle to the end, the Egyptian army led by Ramses III, armed with a high battle range like a giant, has much more strength in the field and is able to have the best on the enemy skirmish. In a description below the battle scene, it is read. The foreign peoples organized a meeting in their islands. No land could resist their army. From Cate to Code, passing through Karchemish, Arzawa and Alashia, they were all scattered away. The enemies established themselves by dying, catching their inhabitants and reducing the land as if it had never existed. They were moving towards Egypt, but a flame was prepared for their arrival. Among them there were the Peleset, the Shekher, the Shekelesh, the Danuna, the Ueshes, all together. A paper found a short time ago contains the end of the story. I have discarded those who invaded us from their lands. I have massacred the Danuna who come from the islands. I have reduced the Shekelesh and the Peleset. The Shardana and the Ueshes of the sea have been annihilated. The Basso-Rilevo and the Papyrus add that the described facts took place during the eighth year of the reign of Ramses III, in 1177 BC. The date so close to the end of the Bronze Age and the size of the territories involved in the invasion of these peoples, from Cyprus, that is, the ancient Alashia, to Hattah, in the Empire of the Littites, have thought for decades to the historians that the collusion of the civilizations of the Bronze Age could be explained with a foreign invasion. Only from Egypt that, in fact, it is the only power that survived the collusion. If any of you have any memories of this period from the subsidiaries of the Middle Ages, you will have heard of it. We are talking about the so-called peoples of the sea. For a long time, the experts of the ancient world have tried to find concrete traces of what is told in the temple of Ramses III. Many have been revealed, for example, on the names of the mysterious people mentioned and on their origin. One of the most fascinating, but also more concrete, of the research is, for example, the Shardana, mentioned twice in the paper found in Medinetabu, and whose name is found in many other Egyptian documents of the time. If you have a sharp ear, you may have heard of it. Their name is very similar to that of Sardinia and the sound is so evident that a legame with an island seems certain, even if we do not know exactly how to define it. The fresh Egyptians of the Temple of Ramses III depict the Shardana privately as armed warriors of swords and a helmet with horns. The only sources written that speak of them, on the other hand, are documents from the court of the pharaon, both before and after the collusion of the Bronze Age. What makes people think that this group of people lived for a certain period in Egypt, perhaps as mercenaries of the pharaon. In addition to the sound with the name Sardinia, someone recognized the Shardana in some statues well-known just in Sardinia, which seem to represent warriors wearing a helmet with horns, made in the same period in which the legendary Nourages were built. For several years, a team of researchers worked on the Shardana project, in the attempt to answer these questions. Who were the Shardanas and where did they come from? At the moment it is impossible to find the answers for sure, despite in the last few years they have been found traces of their passage, also in Crete and Cyprus. We still have a few explanations for the head of the Shardana project, the Egyptologist and expert of the people of the sea, Giacomo Caviglie. My idea is that probably the Shardanas are not Sardinians, but they have frequented the Sardinia, that is, they have been established in the bases that the Micenei have created, and that when the name Micenei is finished, they have continued to use the bases for their piracy. Then the fact is explained that in the Bronze Age, in the next century, when the colonization begins, we have these representations of warriors who are part of a myth, they are part of something they have seen, they are part of the narrative of these Bronze men, who came with these weapons, and who were in contact with the Noragic acidity. Let's go back to the time of Ramses III. Some scholars wanted to identify in the Shacklesh and the Checker other two Italian populations, the Sikuli and the Tirreni, namely the Etruscans. But at the moment we only talk about very suggestive hypotheses, without any confirmation. More concrete evidence of the passage of the peoples of the sea, instead, were found after the attention of the scholars moved from the study of the language to archaeology. In good part of the eastern Mediterranean, from Greece, passing through the modern Turkey, Syria, Lebanon and Israel, in the archaeological layers rising to the period around 1200 BC, there are traces of death and violence. All the main centers in Mycenae were destroyed or abandoned. In Mycenae and Pilo, the two most important cities of Mycenae of the time, the destruction was accompanied by the signs of a fire. The Etite Empire disintegrated in the course of a few years. Ugarit, the capital of the Roman kingdom of which we had talked about in the first episode, was destroyed with the force around 1190 BC. We are sure that because between the ruins of the city there were many arrows found. More or less in the same period, it was attacked for the next time a certain city of the minor Asia, which deserves part of it. Troya. We know the vices of the war of Troya and therefore the deceit of the horse, Lira of Achilles, the profecia of Cassandra, thanks to the Homeric poems. For centuries we have been convinced that Homer or anyone for him had invented everything. We changed our mind only at the end of the 1800s, when the architect and archaeologist Heinrich Schliemann discovered the ruins of nine ancient cities, built one above the other in the narrow of the Dardanelles, between the Sea of Geo and the Black Sea. Schliemann could not identify which was the Homeric Troya, but today we know that the city built on the seventh road, was almost certainly besieged and destroyed by a fire around 1190 BC. Between the streets of the city, the archaeologists found bodies of people half carbonized, probably killed while trying to escape. The seventh road belongs more or less to the same period in which the Micenei palaces were destroyed or abandoned, those of the Syrian coast, and the main cities of the Ithian Empire. A particular study, the British Penelope Montjoy, explicitly linked the destruction of Troya to the people of the sea. So far, everything seems linear. To disturb the perfect balance between the powers of the late Bronze Age were foreign invaders, whose attacks broke away the political entities of the time, one by one. This theory has lasted for decades, but in recent years, thanks to new excavations and research, it has been re-dimensioned. First of all, the arrival of the people of the sea has only been recorded by the Egyptian texts, which, for what we know, could have been a product of the propaganda of the Pharaoh's court. Perhaps these texts report a gigantic and condensed story of several battles fought in the arc of decades. Professor Caviglie explains it to us. The Egyptian, in his texts, says he has always faced the covalent enemy, in fact, they are against the fact that the Pharaoh has fought with various ethnicities or various types of these warriors in more moments. However, the Egyptian logic is that of always putting them all together, all equalized, all against one, just to make the value of the sovereign, therefore its propagandistic value. The Egyptian texts, which are the fundamental ones to understand this phenomenon, must be read, obviously, with an interpretation that takes into account these elements, otherwise, following such a principle, they tell stories that are absolutely not hereditary. Some areas of the Mediterranean, in addition, have not been minimally interested in violence or destruction. Assyrian and Babylonian, for example, subirono el collasso in maniera più contenuta e riuscieron a riprendersi già nel giro di qualche decennio. It is true, as I said before, that traces of destruction are found somewhere in the eastern Mediterranean, in the archeological strats raised to 1200 BC. But linking them with certainty to an external invasion seems problematic. In the Ettite Empire, for example, it seems that most of the cities were already abandoned when the people of the sea reached the region. And in the lands of the so-called Levante, that is, the vast area that goes from Syria to Israel, passing through Lebanon to the Cisjordania, we can attribute with a discreet degree of certainty an external invasion only to Ugarit, thanks to the arrows I was talking about and to some almost contemporary tablets to its destruction, which are the arrival of enemy ships. It cannot be said the same of other cities that could have been destroyed by the other powers of the area, or even by an internal rebellion. Remember when, in the first episode, I told you that the globalization of the Bronze Age had really produced enormous inequalities? Here, in a scenario like this, it is not difficult to think that at a certain point the masses were turned against the elites, stupefied by the scarce division of wealth derived from commerce. This thesis was forced by the fact that in some cities only the places of power were destroyed, while private dwellings were practically intact. Moreover, there is another element. Several archaeologists have made it clear that behind itself the peoples of the sea had left no significant mark, no inscription, no object of daily use, no stone building, no tomb that can be brought back to the entity of the peoples of the sea. The only evidence that we have, in fact, are the historians and archaeologists who think that the peoples of the sea had a more diverse origin than the documented times of Ramses III. Here, let's take a look at its list. Both on the wall of the temple and in the papyrus is mentioned the people of the Pele set. The name tells you something? Really nothing? They are the Philistines of the Bible that, according to the tradition, after being defeated by the Egyptians, settled in the modern Israel in the Aztec of Gaza, that is, the ancient Philistines, from which, centuries later, the Arab populations of the Chisjordania took the name of "Palestinians". But let's go back to the arrival of the Philistines. Their presence has been historically tested since 1100 B.C., so more or less in the arrival of the so-called peoples of the sea. Still in Roman times, the intellectuals preserved the memory of a philistine pentapole, made of five cities, Gaza, Ascalona, Gaza, Ekron and Ashdod. In all five cities there were ceramics of the Bronze Age spread mostly in the continental Greece. In four cities in five, in addition, archaeologists have found a type of pentole, very different from those used in the previous period in the Levant, but identical to the pentoles spread in Greece during the Bronze Age. Does it mean that the Philistines were Greeks? In the Bible, the two most famous characters belonging to the people of the Philistines are Sansone, and Golia, the soldier of gigantic proportions which is defeated by King Davide. The name Sansone has a clear Semitic origin, that is, from the Middle East, and it is similar to the Hebrew word which means "sun". Golia, on the other hand, recalls a name found in some inscriptions in Anatolia, the land of the Littites. These are important indications, even if not decisive, of the fact that among the Philistines there were more ethnic components in addition to the Greek one. Historians have been discussing them for many years, but they have not yet reached a definitive solution. Two scholars, Louis Hitchcock and Aaron Mayer, in recent years have carried this thesis to the next level, and theorized that the so-called peoples of the sea were actually composed of small groups of people of various backgrounds, led by a leader of a test of military bravery and dedicated to escorts and bags. Groups of pirates, in short, produced by the progressive economic and social challenge in the great powers of the time. The archaeologist Marina Pucci explains it to us, expert in the Middle East of the University of Florence. In reality, the actions of pirates, also very intense, were taking place, always taking place in the Mediterranean, in the second half of the 13th century, since the great political entities were no longer able to maintain control, so not even the control of the sea. Obviously, they are becoming more and more numerous, even though something was happening, someone was moving from one side to the other, without another, but without imagining the barbaric hordes that caused the fall of a system. In reality, that is one of the demonstrations that take place in this period, and that can happen because the situation is already very weak, so it is much easier, of course, to go and settle in these small forces of power, so that they can be created in some regions. For example, in Italy, there is a group that is known as Shardana and Peleset, could be referred to specific pirate bands, rather than people. Here, the facienda is more complicated, the archaeological evidence makes them think of "yes", but the documents written left by the Egyptians indicate another direction. When it comes to an external population, an external entity that offers a technical concept, I share it with a geologist that means "Caset", so a country. How do you hear it? Shardana, he writes Shardana, Shardana, Sharden, and puts it as a symbol of the foreign country. If they had used their valence as a combat specialty, they would not have used that kind of gerogritic, but they would have used with a gerogritic a determinative sign that determined the semantic category and therefore with it armed in a certain way. Let's try to make the point. Still today, we do not know for sure who they were or where the peoples of the sea came from. However, among the archaeological traces at our disposal we are not able to understand if they were already present in the territory before 1200 BC as in the case of Shardana, or if they came to small groups at the beginning of the Bronze Age. Among other things, the so-called peoples of the sea do not move everywhere, but only in some cities of the eastern Mediterranean. We must look at the perspective. Who tells us that the arrival of the peoples of the sea was not the cause but the effect of the collision, as Professor Sapucchi said. In other words, it is possible to hypothesize that some peoples decided to dedicate themselves to piracy and to mining of the richest cities, because the world known was precipitated in the chaos. I imagine people who are in movement, so I would call them migrants and not invaders in this sense, who leave their land of origin for contingent reasons to their situation have the possibility to settle on territories that do not oppose a strong resistance to their settlement simply because they have other problems from their point of view. Following this reasoning we must find a even more transversal cause for a collision of systems like that of the 1200 BC. An element that can have conditioned all the powers of then, from Mesopotamia to the Iberian Peninsula. We talk about it in the next episode. [Music] The podcast you just listened was produced thanks to the people who subscribed to the post, which allow our content to be available for everyone and everyone. For 11 years the post tried to do things in a different way, promoting a journalism for which it counts the verified news, the clarity of the language and the respect for the readers. To subscribe and to do your part you can go to abonati.ipost.it