The Hebrew Bible’s memories of the Philistines are another form of cultural memory of the Sea Peoples.

Whatever the specific historical relationship between the Philistines and the people who became the Israelites, the Bible’s account of prolonged conflict with the Philistines preserves memories of the tensions that accompanied the arrival of Aegean migrants in the Levant during the twelfth century BCE.

The Etruscan mystery — the famously unrelated language, the distinctive material culture, the persistent ancient tradition of an Anatolian origin — can be seen as a form of cultural memory of the Bronze Age disruptions that brought new peoples to the western Mediterranean.

Whether that memory accurately reflects Etruscan origins or whether it is a founding myth serving other cultural purposes is a question that genetics has not definitively resolved.