https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/ooqaz3/was_homers_odysseus_a_representation_of_a_distant/It seems like there is a lot of coincidences for this to be an accident. I think homers was retelling past stories of when the myceneans and other greeks were raiding across the Mediterranean. What do you guys think? Don't respond if you don't read the link.
Obviously yes. They don't even need to be any of the specific recorded Sea Peoples but BA Greeks used to be a naval raider culture and established kingdoms like Philistia and Anatolian Achaea
The 2nd century BC Greek writer Eratosthenes dated the Sack of Troy to have specifically happened on June 11, 1184 BC (he used calculation methods that are unfortunately lost), and this actually aligns with what we’ve found in archeology. Troy was indeed a real city, it was originally known as Wiluša (which is also the etymological origin of “Ilion,” a euphemism for the city commonly used in the Iliad), it spoke either Luwian, Lydian, or some other Anatolian language and was a vassal state of the Hittite Empire. Around the time period Eratosthenes roughly dated the Trojan War to, Wiluša was destroyed by the Mycenaean Greeks in a series of sieges that were part of the wider Bronze Age collapse in which several empires and city states across the Near East were destroyed by the “Sea Peoples,” a tribal confederation of seafarers who are believed to be of (mostly) Greek origin. While some of the tribes of the Sea Peoples came from other places (the “Shekelesh” were Sicilians and the “Sherden” were Sardinians), most of them came from the Aegean area and some of their names actually correspond with names used for the Greek forces in the Iliad, such as the “Denyen” which corresponds with the Danaans and the “Ekwesh” which corresponds with the Achaeans (Achaean and Ekwesh also correspond with “Ahhiyawa,” the name used for Greece in Hittite records). There was also the “Lukka” who were basically Lycians and the “Peleset” which many scholars agree are the Philistines mentioned in the Old Testament and due to Philistine pottery having a distinctly Aegean look, it is believed the Philistines are of Greek origin.After the Bronze Age collapse, Greece fell into a dark age and writing wouldn’t return to Greece until 800 BC. By that time, due to centuries of oral tradition, the events of the Mycenaean period would have essentially become legendary.
>>18282796Treating these people as mysterious is quite outdated; we know what the ancients called them, and etymologically, they were an amalgam of Mediterranean peoples. These include the Sherden, Shekelesh, Peleset (often identified with the Philistines), Denyen, Tjeker, Teresh, Lukka, Weshesh, and Ekwesh
>>18282796The interesting thing is that the Sherden chieftain is depicted with the same features that the Egyptians depicted the Semites, a fact that may indicate a Near Eastern origin for the Sherden. SorryThis scenario is reinforced by the Great Karnak inscription of Merneptah, where the Sherden mercenary invaders are reported to have been circumcised. Finally, in a Ugaritic tablet the father of a Sherden is mentioned by the Semitic name Mut-Baal.
>>18282796the Greeks who besieged Troy were definitely Sea Peopleswhat would the economic implications be of a ten-year siege
Yes and no. They raided Troy, not Egypt or the Levant, and they came from Greece, which had been a civilized country with its own palace economy, they weren't barbarians from further afield.But it's set at the end of the Bronze Age and there's definitely a connection even in the myths between the Trojan War and a general social collapse, look at all the trouble its heroes (and not just Odysseus) had in coming home.
Stop trying to link modern-day ethnicities with some undefined, hypothetical gang of retards from 3200 years ago. There's like one source for this and it's borderline worthless. The language it's written in doesn't contain vowels, so every time you tards tell each other that it spells out "sardinians" it might as well be "surdunuuns"It's fucking stupidSomething bad happened to the whole eastern med basin, and the "sea peoples" were just any dipshit pastoral nomad tribe from 1000 miles around big enough to burn down a city.And they don't have any modern day descendents still hanging on the names.
The Mycenaeans resisted a group to the north, an offshoot of the urnfield culture, resisting them in 1250 before finally succumbing in the 1190s, at which point the sea peoples ran amok. The sea peoples stretched as far as Sardinia and were adept at sea travel, so it is likely they were a migration rather like the Goths fleeing the invasions of the Huns. Urnfield offshoots also invaded the Italian peninsula and Anatolia. Some speculate climate change spurred this, perhaps both the invasions by the Urnfield culture and the sea peoples, this would explain why so many different cultures in Italia, Greece and Anatolia began sailing south along known trade routes in search of land.Their families were faced with starvation and their homes had been sacked by equally desperate invaders from the north, thus they set out raiding along the coast. No doubt death rates were high, but due to their numbers and no other options the invasions succeeded in toppling every civilization near the coast except Egypt of course. The invasions it seems they largely disintegrated with only a few like the Peleset settling land or others captured by Egypt planted on the Nile delta to deter other invaders, similar to foederati.Back in Greece, the population had dropped substantially and the Greek dark ages began, though not without maintaining their oral history which would be inscribed by Homer 300 years later using Phoenician script. The invaders introduced the Dorian dialect in western Greece and cremation urns.
>>18282913this is literally a reddit fairytale ok kys
>>18282806Makes sense. Pretty cool. Something interesting I've learned is in real life, evidense points towards Illinois trying to rebel away from the hittites and join the myceneans lol. There was even a guy whose name was very similar to alexander which was the origonal name for Paris of troy. Really cool stuff.
>>18282913I've read about that myself. Some people think the urnfield culture pushed the dorians south into attacking the myceneans. Or that they themselves could've been sea peoples too. All interesting and sadly lost to history.
>>18282796yes
