The grumpy faces you see here belong to invaders captured by the Pharaoh Ramses III (about 1186-1154 BCE). Many scholars have interpreted these men as the infamous “Sea Peoples,” about whom little is known for certain, but to whom historians have attributed the collapse of many civilizations in the Bronze Age.
The Sea Peoples seem to have been a conglomeration of various groups who formed a sort of pirate-like confederacy in the decades around 1200 BCE and went around attacking various cities. Places in modern Egypt, Turkey, Syria, and Lebanon were all subject to invasion by these peoples who have left us no written texts from their own point of view. Ramsey III boasted that he defeated these raiders in 1177 BCE, wiping them out or enslaving them so that “when they pronounce my name in their land, then they are burned up”.
But Ramsey III was lucky. Other places were not — the Hittites, the Ugarit, and about forty other cities were devastated by these Sea Peoples. The Ancient Greek Mycenaean civilization also fell around this time.
Although the Sea Peoples have been blamed for the entire collapse of the Bronze Age in the Mediterranean, archaeologist Eric Cline argues that there was a panoply of Bad Stuff happening in the early 12th century BCE, including earthquakes and drought — he posits that the Sea Peoples might have originated from such national disasters, but the entire hot mess, and not just this one group of raiders, was to blame for the apocalyptic demise of so many peoples at this time.
Sources: _Inside Higher Ed_, “Before the Fall,” review of Eric Cline, _1177 BC: The Year Civilization Collapsed_ (Princeton UP, 2014), by Scott McLemee, April 23, 2014. Image wikimedia commons, Wall relief Medinet Habu, Ramses III
