The Nameless Army of 1177 BCE: Who Brought Down Egypt and Babylon?

Around 1177 BCE, the great cities of the Mediterranean and the Near East burned one after another, emptied out, or lost their written machinery. Hattusa, the Hittite capital in central Anatolia, stopped being a centre of power. Ugarit, a wealthy port on the Syrian coast, was burned and never rebuilt. Several Mycenaean palaces in Greece collapsed. The two names in the title met opposite fates. Egypt did not fall: it stopped the attack at the mouth of the Nile and carved the victory onto its own temple walls. Babylon fell for real, to armies marching in from the east under kings whose names we still know.

Later generations called the arrivals the "Sea Peoples". The name sounds like the name of a people, but it is not what they called themselves. Egyptian kings stuck it onto a crowd arriving from several directions. The inscriptions preserve only a few strange syllables: Peleset, Tjeker, Shekelesh, Denyen, and Weshesh. There is no list of homelands, no single king, and no language sample long enough to identify anyone. A force appeared across several regions at once, broke the centres of power, and then vanished from the records that survived.