this post was submitted on 21 Apr 2025
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A question that I've not seen addressed: The Sea Peoples showed up, raided, invaded, really successfully. Why didn't they stay? Why did they go back to wherever they came from? Isn't that what the Vikings were doing in Britain (also Normandy?) for a while before they decided to stay there?
Maybe they were just really aggressive tourists that kept breaking things by accident. It was all one big Mr. Bean-esque accident.
"Mr..Bean collapses the bronze age"
...I'd watch it
That'd be more of a Blackadder thing, surely. Feel like we're getting our Rowan Atkinson characters mixed up
Yeah... you could be correct there.
Rude, time-traveling Americans.
Wr got tired of colonizing the present and decided to colonize the past.
The most likely scenario is there were immigrants fleeing their homelands for a better life.
The problem with history is we just up and belief what the rules say is true. We know from centuries of more detailed records that is simply not true but when it comes to ancient civilizations we just wholesale accept it.
"Look the despot wrote it down a dozen times, it must be true! Propaganda is beyond their level of cleverness of those silly stone chiselers!"
This just shows a fundamental misunderstanding of how the work of history is done.
Historians don't just read something, believe what it says, then say "that's history, job done".
They tease from a source glimpses of the past.
Each document or artifact provides information, and meta information, that can be used to give us a fuller picture of the past, whether the writer was telling the truth (whose truth?), writing known falsehoods, writing fiction, etc.
No historian believes The Lord of the Rings is true, but if looked at through the lens of history it could be a valuable historical artifact. The Lord of the Rings could teach one about things like: the state of literature and publishing in the mid-twentieth century, cultural attitudes towards war, religion, and industrialization, linguistic fluency among the population, the writer's education level, social standing, and personal attitudes, etc.
You don't exclude a source because it may have a bias, or known falsehoods, or missing information, etc.; you account for those in your study of the source and piece together what we can know despite those issues.
So let me get this straight, you think the field of history fails to consider that people can make up bullshit?
We know from history that historians have believed bullshit history. There is no reason to assume that's changed.
The work historians do is ceases to be science the moment they start filling in the blanks.
Bro what do you think science is? You interpolate, then seek evidence that your interpolation was bad, and if you can’t find such evidence then you accept your interpolation as good.
The study of history is done by many, many different people over many, many centuries. It would be illogical to say that just because some make a certain mistake, all do.
Additionally, you cannot say nothing changes when the understanding of history constantly changes, as our archeological abilities steadily improve.
Lastly, even scientists need to fill in blanks sometimes. Einstein was rather famous for filling in some critical blanks in Newtonian physics, for instance.
I think that's what you meant? If so - no "we" don't. Actual historians are well aware of the possibility (probability?) of ancient propaganda, take that into account when coming to conclusions, and don't claim that something is true beyond what the evidence demonstrates.
Not a historian, but my understanding is that there was widespread crop failure, which led to many people fleeing to major cities to search for a better way of life. Many of these people traveled by boat, which led the home country to view them as sea people. The influx of immigrants further strained the dwindling resources of the home country due to the aforementioned crop failures, which then led to a collapse of many of the cities. Which in turn caused more people to flee to other cities
So to answer your question, I don't think the sea people were really even a singular group people, it's just an umbrella term for immigrants that were fleeing from their home
My theory is that they did stay.