The Sea Peoples entered recorded history on the walls of Medinet Habu, carved in stone by Egyptian artisans who depicted them as enemies of civilization — the chaos that the Pharaoh was chosen by the gods to hold at bay.

The reality was more complex.

The Sea Peoples were people from the Aegean world — from the Mycenaean cities and the Anatolian coasts and the island communities of the eastern Mediterranean — who were displaced by the convergence of forces that ended the Bronze Age.

Drought, trade disruption, political collapse, the cascading failure of an interconnected system — all of these contributed to a crisis that scattered populations across the Mediterranean.

Some of these displaced people moved east and south, toward the still-stable civilizations of Egypt and the Levant.