The ox-carts with women and children at Medinet Habu, the families crossing the sea to find somewhere to live — these images resonate with the experience of displaced people in any era.

Understanding the Sea Peoples as human beings responding to catastrophe, rather than simply as a historical force to be cataloged, is an exercise in historical empathy that has implications for how we think about displacement and migration in the present.

These are reasons why the study of the Sea Peoples is not a narrow academic exercise but part of the broader project of understanding human history in its full complexity.

The Final Account