This is a crucial reframing.

In the older narrative, the Sea Peoples are the active destroyers of the Bronze Age world.

In the newer understanding, they are partly victims of a broader collapse — refugees from the western catastrophes who then contributed to the collapse of the eastern civilizations they encountered.

The cause and the consequence were intertwined in ways that the Egyptian records, which focus on Egypt’s perspective, do not clearly convey.

Eric Cline’s influential 2014 book “1177 BC: The Year Civilization Collapsed” synthesizes this evidence and argues for a “perfect storm” of multiple causative factors converging simultaneously.