We know that the Peleset had Aegean ancestors.

We know that the Bronze Age Collapse was a multi-factorial crisis, not simply an invasion.

We know that the “Sea Peoples” were not a unified ethnic group but a complex mixture of peoples displaced by the same broader catastrophe.

What we do not know — and may never know — is what the people in those ox-carts were thinking as they moved eastward toward Egypt, toward a confrontation with the most powerful state in their world.

What they hoped for.