Sea Peoples

Some kind of sea gypsies

I think the Sea Peoples were just what the Egyptians said they were; a mass-migration of several different tribes from around the Mediterranean. As it relates to Atlantis... who knows? I think that if Atlantis existed at all it was probably based around the civilization we now know as Tartessos in Spain, which in turn may be the site of the Biblical Tarshish. Atlantis is such a tricky subject though. If only we could ask Plato.

Originally posted by pytheas Tartessos was mostly famous for its silver production and actually dated to later than is realistic in connecting it with biblical Tarshish.

 

Well, that's debatable. No one really knows where Tarshish was located, nor do they know with certainty how old Tartessos is. It's an interesting possibility that the two may be one in the same, but it certainly isn't proven one way or the other.

i found this about sea people

The Sea People are certainly an enigma.I tend toward the Hellene part.Who's to say that there wasn't Etruscan elements(and other wanderers from that part of Europe)who came to Greece and was part of a migration South and East?Who can say with authority what Central and Northern Europe was all about during the times of Egyptian and Near East empirical history?Atlantis is simply a catch-all phrase that has a truth in it somewhere,but if the answer is ever found the name Atlantis will not be a part of it.

Here is a sample of the finds in Ekron  dated to approx. 1200BC and clearly related to Mycenean style pottery.






Edited by Phallanx

The only thing clear about these Urnfield peoples is that they were IE speakers and at least Celts

It's for sure, is it? How so?

Originally posted by Zagros Purya The only thing clear about these Urnfield peoples is that they were IE speakers and at least Celts It's for sure, is it? How so?

The Urnfields extended not just eastward but westward and southward. In the west, the area I know better they are not just identified by all prehistorians as IEs or Celts but also I can give you a very illustrative example I know well: the Iberian case.

c. 1300 BCE: the Urnfield peoples descend along the west bank of the Rhone and occupy areas of Southern France and NE Spain. In Spain this is basically what is now Catalonia and a rather narrow strip along the Ebro river.
c. 800 BCE: they switch to Hallsat culture (Early Iron), which is also known to be Celtic and Illyrian (but not anymore Italic).
c. 700 BCE: they infiltrate/invade (depending of the region) the Iberian platau and the Atlantic coasts.
c. 600 BCE: coincident with the foundation of Massalia (Marseilles) by the Greeks these peoples lose their first area of settlement in NW Iberia to Iberians (and Basques), becoming separated from the continent and losing contact with their relatives of mainland Europe.
since 400 BCE: mainland Celts adopt the culture of La T�ne (considered exclussively Celtic) and expand widely into the Balcans, France, British Islands and even Northern Italy. This culture of La T�ne, nor the druidistic phenomenon they import from Britain, ever reaches the Celts of Iberia.

Conclussion the Celts of Iberia could only come before 600 BCE, belonging therefore to the cultural complex that includes Hallstatt and Urnfields cultures.

Is this authoritative enough? I think it is.

The only doubt is wether among the Urnfield peoples that invaded NW Iberia c. 1300 were exclussively Celts or did they include also other groups such as Illyrians? This question is maybe relevant regarding the Lusitanian culture, that is mostly refered to as being Celtic but that some seem to think could be ethnically differentiated. But in any case this doesn't change the big picture of Celts being inside the Urnfiled culture and some of its migrations, specifically those westward (meaning maybe that Celts were the most westward nation of those gathered under the war banner of the Urnfield horde and that they probably were already dwelling around the Rhin since c. 1700 BCE).



Edited by Maju

Originally posted by Zagros Purya Sounds more like, to coin a new phrase, Celticism; ethnocentric nonsense laying claims to an otherwise non-existent classical prominence.

I'm not Celtic nor have any particular likehood for that people. In fact I like to believe that the term Keltoi may be an Ibero/Basque/Ligurian loan meaning "dirty" or "worthless" - and not just a mere deformation of Gaul/Gaelic. So I'm not particularly fond of Celts, who I tend to consider invaders of ancient times. The avant-guard of IE invasion of Western Europe.

At least I'm not suspicious of Celtic ethnocentrism. But I've taken a good look at the facts and I'm as possitive as one can be that Urnfield culture included several IE groups, among them were Celts. I also give a very good level of certainty to Italics and Illyrians being there as well.

I am also sure that Germans (Nordic Bronze) weren't in that group but rather suffered their influence, as did the probably Slavic peoples of Lausitz culture in Poland.

But I don't think that IEs originated in Europe but in Central Asia. These IE nations are just a product of at least three succesive migrations/expansions (and the corresponding mixture with much larger local populations) along several milennia. They had been quiet beyond the Rhin and the Alps for about 1100 years (all Late Calcolithic, and Early and Middle Bronze ages) but with the Urnfields culture they exploded again.

I think that nowadays those theories on "Aryan" supremacy are (fortunately) restricted to a bunch of fanatics with one or two neurones at most, who need something like that to justify their otherwise pathetic existence.

Originally posted by Zagros Purya I wasn't directing it at you, rather the theory you present. I don't see how an ancient tribal people could be so widespread and powerful as to be able to usurp civilizations on either end of Southern Europe and the Middle East simultaneously, the logic that they invaded Iberia and must therefore have been the same people that took out Greece, Egypt and other ME places is, for lack of a better word, ridiculous.

Well, if you follow the discussion that Phallanx and I had, and the links posted here on Sea Peoples, it doesn't seem so evident that the Urnfields actually took out anyone but in some "nearby" regions. After reading some stuff posted here and in other topics I'm strongly reconsidering my former opinion of Sea Peoples and Urnfiled peoples being the same. Instead the only thing for sure we can say of the Urnfields peoples is that they experimented an expansion very simmilar to the one that La T�ne Celts would make 900 years after them, bringing them to the western Balcans (Illyrians), to Northern Italy (Italics and some Illyrians too) and to some specific areas of Western Europe (Celts). Wether Illyrians and Thracians (which seem non-Urnfield but are influenced and contemporary) took part in the Sea Peoples and the destruction of the Hittite empire or if this was a mainly Greek adventure, with some local allies like Lybians and Lycians and maybe even Etruscans, is another story.

At this moment I'm leaning for Phallanx' and others' theory that it was a mainly Greek "Viking-like" phenomenon (but with many incongnites).

Anyhow, History shows several cases of pre-gunpowder peoples expanding at fast speed even over apparently solid empires:
- Germanic invasions of the 5th century, that destroyed the Western Roman Empire;
- Arab/Muslim expansion of the 7th century, that destroyed the Sassanid Empire and took large pieces of the Eastern Roman Empire;
- Mongol expansion of the 13th century, that took over China and Persia and even the Caliph of Baghdad eventually.

Other examples can also be considered as well. I find no reason to doubt that a "horde" of Illyrian, Italic and Celtic tribes could expand easily into those rather undeveloped and rather nearby areas in the 13th century BCE, specially as archaeology supports strongly this phenomenon. A quasi-repetition of the phenomenon took part in the 4th-3rd centuries BCE this time including only Celts (in this case not just archaeology but also written documents prove it: La T�ne Celts were found from Britain and Ireland to Galatia in Anatolia and Northern Italy, having sacked Rome once).