The Sea Peoples: The Ancient Mystery That Stumped Historians For Centuries — And What Modern Science Finally Revealed About Who They Really Were
They were also, in a real sense, the founders of what came next.
The Philistines became one of the dominant cultures of the Iron Age Levant, lasting for centuries before being conquered by Assyria and eventually assimilated into the broader Near Eastern world.
The various other Sea Peoples groups contributed to the populations of Cyprus, the Aegean, Italy, and the western Mediterranean, helping to shape the cultures that would develop during the first millennium BCE.
The Bronze Age ended not because of a catastrophe without precedent, but because of the convergence of multiple stresses on a system that had grown too interconnected and too dependent on conditions that could not be sustained.