The Philistines are the Sea Peoples group about whom we have the most information — because they were the group that left the most substantial archaeological and textual record in the Levant, and because they appear prominently in the Hebrew Bible as significant adversaries of the early Israelite kingdoms.

For the other Sea Peoples groups, the evidence is more fragmentary and the conclusions less certain.

The Shardana (Sherden) are one of the more interesting cases.

They appear in Egyptian records earlier than most of the other Sea Peoples groups — in the Amarna letters of the fourteenth century BCE, in accounts of battles against Egyptian armies, and then as mercenaries in Egyptian service, where Ramesses II famously used Shardana warriors as part of his personal guard.

The shift from enemy to mercenary is itself interesting: it suggests a group that was in contact with Egypt over an extended period rather than simply appearing as part of a single catastrophic wave.