Memory and the Mediterranean by Fernand Braudel

Author:Fernand Braudel [Braudel, Fernand]
Language: eng
Format: azw3, pdf
ISBN: 9780307773364
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2011-02-09T05:00:00+00:00

The intractable problem of the Peoples of the Sea would—if this version of the Mycenaean drama is correct—become a lot clearer.

This was a long-drawn-out episode, since the Egyptian records in 1225 B.C. describe these Peoples of the Sea as being allied to the Libyans, their worrying neighbours who were invading the western delta of the Nile. Among them were Lycians, and some ethnic groups which may correspond (according to the names given them by the Egyptians) to the future Sardinians and Etruscans, as well as Achaeans and Mycenaeans. Were the latter the people whom the Egyptian texts describe as “of great stature, with tall white bodies, fair hair and blue eyes”? The battle was a tough but decisive one. Thousands of prisoners remained in the hands of Egyptians, and the bloody booty of the war included heaps of the severed hands and genitals of their slaughtered enemies. This drama occurred very shortly after the destruction of the Mycenaean palaces; it happened in Egypt, a country well known to the seafarers of Argos; and the incomers were allied to the Libyans, a people who, if there had been serious drought, would automatically have migrated towards the Nile. We might therefore imagine that some Mycenaean seafarers, having been suddenly deprived of their usual trades, turned pirate.

A few decades later, danger loomed again for Egypt, just as it was emerging from a long crisis of authority and thus of military might: the profession of soldier which by its hardships turned a man into “an old worm-eaten block of wood” had become a despised occupation. The new pharaoh, Ramses III, enrolled Libyan mercenaries branded with red-hot iron, and sailors press-ganged from the Syrian coast. These were prudent precautions, since the raid launched by the mixed Peoples of the Sea, whom the last Ugarit documents (1200 B.C.) show as based in Cyprus and Cilicia, would reach Carchemish and unfurl southwards, destroying Ugarit on the way. Sailing ships from the “islands of the Great Green Sea” (an expression which probably covered the whole of the Aegean, including the mainland coasts) accompanied these overland convoys which followed the shoreline, men, women and children and all their wordly goods travelling in ox-carts. In 1180, Egypt inflicted two bloody defeats on these people, one at sea, probably just off the Delta, and the other on land, in Syria, probably in the Hala plain north of Tripoli.

Although the Egyptian victory was uncontested, it did not settle the problem for good. It seems that Ramses III eventually had to allow “some of the Peoples of the Sea to settle as colonists and mercenaries in the Delta.” As for the Philistines, with or without the pharaoh’s consent, they settled in the land to which they would give their name—Palestine—which they had to defend against the Hebrews. So according to the traditional accounts, the terrible Peoples of the Sea vanish at a stroke into the oubliettes of history. The cities of Syria which had not been occupied were saved by Egypt and later recovered their prosperity—except for Ugarit.

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