The warriors in distinctive headdresses that mark them as people from somewhere specific, people with their own cultural traditions and their own identities.

The artists who carved these reliefs were Egyptian craftsmen who had presumably never traveled to the Aegean or to whatever homeland the Sea Peoples were coming from.

They were recording what they saw and were told to see: enemies of Egypt.

But in the specificity of the detail — the feathers in the headdresses, the distinctive equipment, the family groups in the wagons — they preserved a portrait of the Sea Peoples that has no parallel in any other ancient source.

We know, now, more than we have ever known about who these people were.