The Shekelesh.

The Denyen.

The Weshesh.

The Teresh.

The Lukka.

The Ekwesh.

The Shardana.

These are the people the Egyptians called the “peoples of the sea” — a confederation or coalition or wave of migrants and raiders who descended on the eastern Mediterranean around 1200 BCE and participated in, or possibly caused, one of the most dramatic transformations in ancient history: the collapse of the Late Bronze Age.

The Bronze Age Collapse destroyed nearly every major civilization in the eastern Mediterranean simultaneously.

The Hittite Empire — which had rivaled Egypt for centuries — simply ceased to exist.

The Mycenaean civilization of Greece collapsed so completely that the Greeks forgot how to write.

The palace centers of Ugarit, Megiddo, Hazor, Lachish, and dozens of other cities were burned, abandoned, or drastically reduced.

Trade networks that had connected Egypt to Greece to Anatolia to the Levant to Cyprus for centuries fell apart.

The interconnected world of the Late Bronze Age, with its international diplomacy, its standardized weights, its luxury trade in tin and copper and fine pottery, essentially ended within a generation.