The Sea Peoples: The Ancient Mystery That Stumped Historians For Centuries — And What Modern Science Finally Revealed About Who They Really Were

The Lukka seem clearly to be the Lycians of southwestern Anatolia.

The Denyen may be connected to the Danaoi — one of Homer’s terms for the Greeks.

The Ekwesh have been proposed as Achaeans — again, a term for Mycenaean Greeks.

But these equations are far from certain, and in many cases they have been criticized as too convenient — too eager to fit poorly-understood names from Egyptian inscriptions into the framework of peoples that historians already knew from other sources.

The equations were initially made in the late nineteenth century, when the discipline of ancient Near Eastern studies was young and the evidence was more limited than it is today.