The feathered headdresses on the walls of Medinet Habu look back across three millennia.

The DNA extracted from their descendants’ bones speaks across the same distance.

And the picture they together assemble — partial, probabilistic, still debated, but increasingly detailed — is the closest thing we have to actually knowing the Sea Peoples.

They came from the Aegean world that was collapsing around them.

They moved because they had to.

They settled where they could.

They left children and communities and cultural traces.

And their story is, in the deepest sense, a human story — of people moving through a world in crisis, looking for somewhere to survive.