It was a massive invasion, a true migration of peoples that’s reminiscent of the “great invasions” (Völkerwanderung) of the High Middle Ages. It was not only raiding parties, but whole peoples with their women and children transported on the back of heavy ox-wagons who threw themselves into the conquest of a new home. This explains why the invasion of the Sea Peoples has been described as “the largest and fasted invasion that world has ever seen.”280
Together with their Libyan, Tyrrhenian and Anatolian tribesmen allies that they carried with them along the way, the Sea peoples attacked Egypt in the Ramesses III period, who likely reigned between 1186 and 1154 BC. But this time, they had some serious setbacks. The Pharaoh’s troops stopped them twice and then definitively wiped out their navy at the entrance of a tributary of the Nile. This exploit that happened in 1177 BC281 is confirmed by the cross-checking of the Harris Papyrus and what is written on the walls of the funeral temple of Medinet Habu. The Egyptian texts mention the capture of 100,000 prisoners by Ramesses III’s troops.
The bas-reliefs of Medinet Haby describe with some degree of precision the attackers. They make them out to be tall, with a straight nose, often tattooed, but clean shaven and not circumcised. They are dressed in some nature of kilts and leather corselets, they are equipped with large round shields, spears and long swords (but never bows or arrows), and feathery toques (maybe eagle feathers) or helmets with tufts and chinstraps festooned with a pair of horns separated by a disk. On the ground, they used war chariots, but on the sea, they used ships whose bows and sterns were shaped as animal heads, most commonly bird heads. Moreover, they used iron metallurgy.282
The question of the identity and origin of the Sea Peoples remains one of the more discussed topics of the research being undertaken. Eliezer D. Oren sees it as “one of the most curiously irritating phenomenon of the history of the Mediterranean Basin.”283 Many authors confine themselves to linking them to the Aegean world, but it is hardly believable that the population of Cyprus and Crete on its own disintegrated the whole Bronze Age Mediterranean civilization. Cyprus and Crete were more likely just a step of their expansion. Some other authors believe that they come from the Balkans and the Danube, more specifically Dalmatia or Illyria, or even southern Russia and further. It is supposedly only in a second phase that they settled somewhere in the Aegean Sea and Anatolia, where they supposedly mingled with the locals.
Egyptian texts describe the Sea Peoples as coming from “islands and land bathed by the Very-Green,” “islands from the middle of the sea,” “islands and continents from the global sea located all the way up north,” the extremity of the “great circular ocean,” the “edges of the global darkness, the end of the Earth and the columns of the sky.” The Harris Papyrus also call them “peoples from the ninth arc” (the Egyptians divided the known terrestrial world into nine “arcs”). This “ninth arc” corresponds to the territories located between the 52th and 57th parallels north, so northern Germany and southern Scandinavia, or the between the 48th and 54th parallels north. Their invasions were supposedly the result of terrible natural disasters and climate change that affected their homeland. Pierre Grandet writes that “they actually belonged to one of the great Indo-European waves that left marks all over the coasts of the Mediterranean, from Sardinia to Sicily.” This “Indo-European wave coming from the North supposedly mixed with Mycenaeans from the Peloponnese, and then spread to the islands and coasts of the Aegean Sea.”284 So the Sea Peoples supposedly formed a vast “multinational” coalition that way, amalgamating peoples from continental Europe and the Mediterranean who were already settled in Anatolia and the Aegean Islands.
Fred C. Woudhuizen attributes to the Sea Peoples a language related to Luwian, like the languages of the Danunians, Cilicians, Isaurians, Lydians, Kaunians, Lycians and maybe also the Carians.285 This language is also supposedly the language of the famous Phaistos Disk. Found in 1908 in the ruins of a small Minoan palace, this disk with a roughly 15 cm diameter bears 242 pictograms on its two sides. Those pictograms are laid out on a spiral delineated by bars that make sixty-one boxes. There are forty-five signs present on it and, apparently, they could be read outwards from the center of the disk. They supposedly have nothing in common with Cretan hieroglyphs or Linear A, which kills any hope of linking them to the Minoan iconographic directory. It seems that one of the signs represent a warrior’s head wearing a plumed helmet just like the haircut attributed to the Sea Peoples described on the walls of the temple of Medinet Haby. Vladimir Georgiev has also connected the Phaistos Disk to the Luwian language,286 and Jean Faucounau linked it to some ancient Proto-Ionian.287
Egyptian sources also mention the names of the Sea Peoples and name the ten most important tribes: the Eqwesh, the Denyens, the Derden, the Lukkas, the Peleset, the Shekelesh maybe from the region of Sagalassos in Anatolia, the Sherden maybe from the Balkans, the Teresh, the Tjeker, and finally the Weshesh maybe from Ionia.
After their defeat to Ramesses III’s troops, all these peoples went back to Cyprus and the coasts of the Levant, before scattering all over the Mediterranean. It is very likely that the Sardis and the Sicels sprung out of the Sherden and the Shekelesh, and they gave their names to Sardinia and Sicily. The Peleset became the Philistines and settled in Palestine. The Teresh settled in Troad and were most probably the ancestors of the Tyrrhenians and the Etruscans. The Eqwesh were the ancestors of the Achaeans, and the Derden were probably identical to the Dardanoi mentioned by Homer in the Iliad. The Denyen supposedly settled in Galilee, and the Lukkas supposedly became the Lycians.
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From the Philistines to the Phoenicians
Out of all of the Sea Peoples, the most famous one is undoubtedly the Philistines, they are called Pelischtim in the Bible where they are mentioned many times. They were settled in Canaan and the Levant, especially in the southern part of the plain along the coastline. They are responsible for its current name, Palestine.288 The Philistines created a powerful federation of five cities (Gaza, Ashkalon, Ashdod, Ekron and Gath) that became a melting pot and started an original culture. That culture was apparently linked to the Aegean civilization (their painted ceramics are very close to Mycenaean ceramics). Their origins remain controversial. According to a legendary tradition found in the Bible, they come from Caphtor, which has been identified to be Crete. Trude and Moshe Dothan, who underline the kinship between their material culture and the culture of the Mycenaean world, believe that they came from the Aegaen through the intermediary of the Levant. However, the little linguistic and onomastic data we have suggests that they probably came from Anatolia. The two theories can coincide if conceding that the Philistines and the Pelasgians described by Herodotus and Thucydides were the “native” inhabitants of Greece. This theory was brought up by the Frenchman Etienne Fourmant in 1747, then by the Egyptologist François Chabas in 1873, and then it was picked up by Vladimir Georgiev, starting from 1950, on the basis of the former Greek denomination of the Pelasgians, Pelastoi. Finally, it was more recently picked up with new arguments by Christopher Wilhelm.289 But “Illyrian” origins were also attributed to the Philistines.290 Nancy K. Sandars writes that “the Philistines may have only been a ruling class that was absorbed by the local population. In any case, there was something genuinely Nordic in their creation.”291
We hardly know anything about the Philistine language, beside that it was most likely an Indo-European language, probably close to Luwian or maybe neo-Hittite. As early as the beginning of the 20th century, the Irish archaeologist Robert Alexander Stewart Macalister presented the Philistines as the inventors of the alphabet, and he thought that they shared it with the other Semitic people of Canaan.292 The searches conducted in the ancient cities of Ashdod, Ashkelon and more importantly Ekron (Tell Mikne) give us reasons to believe that there was a Philistine writing. Some searchers think one example is the four terra cotta tablets found in 1964 by the Dutch archaeologist Hendricus Jacobus Franken in Tell Deir ’Alla, in the Jordan Vall
ey, but this interpretation remains controversial. The searches in Ashdod also yielded two stratified seals bearing cryptic signs similar to Cypro-Mycenaean writing from the early Bronze Age. They have yet to be deciphered.293 In August 1976, a five-line inscription on a piece of an earthenware jar (whose fifth line could be an alphabet primer that corresponds beside two exceptions to the twenty-two letters of the Phoenician alphabet) was found inside a silo in Izbet Sartah, in Israel. It dates to the 12th century BC, and it seems to go back to Philistine occupation. Incidentally, the village of Izbet Sartah is only a few kilometers away from the ancient Philistine city of Apheq, where the Philistines won a decisive victory against the Israelites. Nonetheless, the exact origin of the inscription, which has yet to be deciphered, remains controversial.294 Still, the theory that the Phoenicians got their writing from the Philistines, which lived on the coasts of the Levant before them, must be considered.
The Phoenicians appeared after the invasion of the Sea Peoples, around 1180 BC. In the Iron Age, their territory stretched all across the coastal area of Lebanon, between Mount Casius in the north and Haifa in the south. Their main cities were the city-states of Ugarit, Tyre, Sidon, Akka, Berit and Byblos. The name given to them by the Greeks (Phoinikes, from phoinix, “red” in Greek) -a name with an Indo-European origin, both from its stem phoinos, which is an adjective that means “blood red,” and from its suffix îk — might have evoked the purple dye that was their specialty. The country they settled in was already inhabited since the 3rd millennium BC by sedentary Canaanite tribes. They quickly mingled with those tribes that might have had Amorite origins. Intentionally focused on the sea, they quickly established a real maritime empire that comprised many trading posts. Their ships had horse heads as figureheads. Their pilots could find their way Ursa Minor. They founded Carthage in 814 BC. Phoenicia was added to the Roman province of Syria in 64 BC.
The Phoenician language belongs to the Canaanite language group (west Semitic), but the origin of the Phoenician people is still unknown. According to Gerhard Herm, who believes their ancestors were from a region located between Western Europe and Southern Russia, the Phoenicians sprung out of a fusion between Canaanites and Sea Peoples settled on the coasts of the Levant, in particular the Philistines and the Sakars. He writes that the Sea Peoples “had to unite with the Canaanites later on and be absorbed by them. This fusion, gave birth to the Phoenician nation, whose maritime knowledge was built on the Sea Peoples’ expertise.”295 Then the Phoenicians supposedly shared the art of high sea navigation and maybe iron metallurgy to Semitic people. The Hebrews also asked their help to build the Temple in Jerusalem, according to what is written in the Bible.296 Gerhard Herm adds that “the formula Canaanites + Sea Peoples = Phoenicians cannot be questioned.” The great specialist on this topic Sabatino Moscati agrees.297
So, it seems reasonable to claim that the Sea Peoples had a system of symbols that were the source of the Phoenician alphabet, but also other Mediterranean writings and maybe the Libyco-Berber script called tifinagh in Tuareg.298 This theory doesn’t dismiss the influence that those writing systems had on each other, but it suggests a common heritage. It explains the formal similarities between the Phoenician, Greek, Etruscan, Latin and Germanic (runic) writings without having to make them derive from one another.
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The Etruscans
Among the authors of Antiquity, only Dionysius of Halicarnassus (I, 30) wrote that the Etruscans were natives of Italy. All the other authors, Strabo, Plutarch, Livy, Virgil, Horace, Ovid, Tacitus, and Seneca the Younger sided with Herodotus in saying that they came from Asia minor. The theory that the Etruscans were natives of Italy and were descendants of Villanovians or Apenninians was picked up in 1926 by the Italian archaeologist Massimo Pallottino. This theory is heavily criticized nowadays. Everything suggests that the Etruscans do come from Asia minor, as it is written in Virgil’s Aeneid, as well as in other ancient texts.
Christopher Wilhelm does not shy away from connecting the Etruscans with the dispersion of the Sea Peoples at the end of the Bronze Age,299 but there is every reason to believe that their ancestors already occupied in the 14th century BC some of the Troad, in north-western Anatolia. That is because Hittite archives mention at that time a Tyrrhenian country west of them. After having taken part in the Sea Peoples’ offensive against Egypt, they supposedly settled in Crete, the island of Lemnos and in the Aegean Islands. Then they supposedly mass migrated to northeastern Italy at the same time as the future Rhaetic populations, which may have been driven out of Asia minor by the arrival of the Phrygians. Thucydides (IV, 109) also thought that they were related to the Pelasgians. Hellanicus of Lesbos, another Greek historian, thought that they were Pelasgians that landed at the mouth of the Po, in northern Italy. As we’ve seen earlier in this book, Egyptians from the Ramesses III period knew them under the name Teresh (trsh) or Tursha, which corresponds to the Latin name Tusci derived from*Turschi. Called Tursānes or Tyrsenians (Tursēnoi) by the Greeks, they were called Tyrrhenians afterwards. Later on, the Umbri and the Latins called them the Etruscans. The name E-trus-cī is derived from the ancient forms *Trōs-es and *Trōs-yā, which confirms that the Trojans and the Etruscans were related. Fritz Schachermeyr also believed that the Etruscans came from a territory in northwestern Asia minor that comprised the Troad, Mysia and northern Lydia.300 The same theory was recently picked up by Robert S. P. Beekes.301
This is the ancient migration narrated by the Aeneid with the tale of Aeneas, his father Anchises, and also Antenor that was said to have founded the city of Patavium, which is now Padua.302 So then the Trojan tale told by Virgil would therefore not be a poetic fabrication. The Tyrsenians supposedly lived a long time close to the Lydians, and the latter’s vocabulary eased its way into the former’s language (the Lydian name Srkastu seems to correspond to Sergestus, a companion of Aeneas in the Aeneid). Beekes also believes that the name of Ascanius, Aeneas’s son, is related to an ally of the Trojans named Askanios in the Iliad. By the way, the Aeneid is not the only ancient text that mentions that the future Etruscans left for Italy. Another tale mentions an Etruscan migration led by Cory(n)thos, son of Paris and Oenone, and the Etruscan city of Tarquinia (founded by a legendary hero that might have been assimilated with the Anatolia god of storms Tarhuntas) is also known as Corythus or Corinthus. Two centuries before Virgil, Gnaeus Naevius described the Aeneas’s journey from Troy to Italy in the prologue of his Bellum Punicum. Moreover, the oldest representation of the escape from Troy that we know of is on an Etruscan vase from the 7th century BC.
It was believed for a long time that the Etruscans arrived in Italy only in the 8th century BC because they appear on the map at that time, on a territory between the Arno and the Tiber. But Herodotus, who describes the Tyrrhenians as Lydians that left their land under the direction of the legendary king Tyrrhenus, son of Atys, assures us that they settled in the Italian peninsula much earlier. We know that there had been relations between the Mycenaean kingdom of Pylos and the Tyrrhenian coast, north of Latium, as early as the third quarter of the 2nd millennium BC. So, the historical Etruscans were supposedly the result of the fusion of newcomers and the native population made of Villanovians and Apenninians.
The Anatolian origin of the Etruscans has finally been confirmed by genetics. Studies on the mitochondrial DNA of Tuscan people have confirmed that they are related with populations from Anatolia.303
The Estruscan language is generally not considered part of the Indo-European language group. We know how to read it but we still don’t know how to decipher it. Still, some linguists affirm that they are related to the Indo-European languages of Anatolia. They argue that those languages are quite original compared to Proto-Indo-European. Vladimir Georgiev, who makes it out to be the heir of Hittite, believes that the language was derived from a Luwian dialect related to Lydian.304 Francisco Adrados also thinks that it is related to Luwian, whereas Jean Faucounau links Etruscan to Lycian. Giulio Facchetti thinks he can m
ake a connection between Proto-Tyrsenian, the ancestor of the Etruscan language, and Minoan documents written in Linear A.305 Paul Kretschmer thinks there is a connection between languages like Rhaetian, Lycian, Etruscan and “Proto-Indo-European” populations.306 More recently, Fred C. Woudhuizen attempted to decipher the longest known Etruscan text using Luwian.307 All those attempts to find connections remain uncertain. It is certain that there Etruscan has an Anatolian component (the name of the Tarquinia most likely reflects the stem of the Hittite verb tarh- “vanquish” and in particular its derivations with -u-). But trying to make it an Anatolian language stumbles over the fact that the more conservative sectors of the vocabulary like the numerals and the names of relatives can not be interpreted from the perspective of Anatolian languages. Finally, it should be noted that the language spoken in Sardinia before the Romanization may have been related to Etruscan, but it may not have necessarily been derived from it.308
The fact that the Etruscans were not natives of Italy raises the question as to how they came to see the alphabet. Was it handed to them by the Greeks, like how it is generally believed, or was it handed to them by the Phoenicians? After they settled in Italy or before? Did they bring to Italy an alphabet derived from the same source the Phoenician alphabet is derived from? Was there a lineage or a parallel evolution?
The Etruscan alphabet is present on many objects. The oldest one was discovered in the princely tomb of Marsiliana d’Albegna, and dates to around 700 BC. This alphabet comprises twenty-six letters, most of them are very similar to Greek letters. It also comprises signs that show no resemblance to Phoenician or classical Greek. This alphabet seems to come from Cumae, a former Greek colony near Naples. Since this alphabet (whose number of letters was later reduced to twenty) is almost contemporary of the more ancient known Etruscan inscriptions, the inscriptions of the great necropolises of Tarquinia (Monterozzi) and Banditaccia (Cerveteri), we positively know that it was written from right to left or in boustrophedon mode. But what Greek alphabet was it derived from? The first version of the Greek system used by the Etruscans was supposedly the archaic Greek alphabet used in the town of Chalcis in Euboea, at the end of the 8th century BC. After having been brought by the Greeks that came to Ischia to settle, it was then supposedly transmitted to the Chalcidian colony that founded around the –760 the town of Cumae. This Chalcidian alphabet also supposedly influenced the Sicels’ alphabet (Sicily) and the Messapian alphabet (Apulia and Calabria). According to another tradition passed on by Pliny, it was the Pelasgians that created the Italic alphabets.
Runes and the Origins of Writing Page 11