Others probably died — in the fighting, in the famines, in the displacement.

The people at Medinet Habu — the warriors in feathered headdresses, the women and children in ox-carts — were not simply an undifferentiated historical force.

They were individuals: warriors with families, parents with children, communities with their own histories and traditions and memories of a world that was being destroyed around them.

The ox-carts with women and children, depicted so vividly in the Medinet Habu reliefs, are perhaps the most humanizing image from the entire Sea Peoples period.

These are not raiders — they are people moving with everything they own, with their most vulnerable members, trying to find somewhere to survive.