Who were the Sea Peoples? The real history behind Nolan’s The Odyssey, and Cyprus’s place in it

Films cinemahistoryhollywoodTop News Who were the Sea Peoples? The real history behind Nolan’s The Odyssey, and Cyprus’s place in it Odyssey Relevant News Who were the Sea Peoples? The real history behind Nolan’s The Odyssey, and Cyprus’s place in it 17 July 2026 Aid group says seven Americans quarantining at Kenya Ebola facility after US travel ban 17 July 2026 Landslide buries residents in southwest China’s Chongqing 17 July 2026 newsroom 17 July 2026 FacebookXWhatsAppEmailPrintViber In Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey, the Sea Peoples appear as ghostly figures circling a world already coming apart. That fear is far older than the film, according to Joshua David McDermott, a postdoctoral researcher in Classics and Ancient History at the University of Sydney. Ancient writers around 1200 BCE were already pointing to the same group when they tried to explain why the tightly connected Bronze Age world, a network of kingdoms and trade routes stretching from roughly 1500 to 1180 BCE, fell apart. Cyprus sat right in the middle of that network, and its fate was bound up with everyone else’s, McDermott explains. No single event brought that world down, he adds. The great palaces at Mycenae and Pylos in Greece, home to the kings who inspired Homer, were reduced to ash. Over in modern-day Turkey, the once-dominant Hittite empire, which had held power over Troy, disintegrated. Within a short span of years, cities across Syria, Cyprus and Canaan met similarly violent ends. According to McDermott, modern historians tend to reject a single culprit for this “systems collapse.” Instead, they describe a pile-up of disasters: a megadrought lasting some three centuries that starved populations, trade networks that Bronze Age economies depended on collapsing under strain, and large-scale movements of people, some settling peacefully, others arriving as conquerors. And across letters and monuments from Egypt to the Levant, one name keeps surfacing: the Sea Peoples. So who were they actually, and what part, if any, did Cyprus play in their story? How Egypt told it The Sea Peoples first turn up by name in inscriptions commissioned by two pharaohs, Merneptah and Ramses III, who governed Egypt between 1213 and 1203 BCE and 1186 and 1155 BCE. At Ramses’ mortuary temple near Luxor’s Valley of the Kings, the carved text accuses “the foreign countries” of forming “a conspiracy in their islands”, listing the Peleset (Philistines), Tjekker, Shekelesh (Sicilians), Danuna (Greeks) and Weshesh as having descended from the Aegean region. According to the inscription, “no land could stand before their arms” as the invaders “laid their hands upon the lands as far as the circuit of the earth.” Egyptian temple art shows them as a single undifferentiated mass of warriors, their fleet sunk by a pharaoh cast as divinely invincible. As McDermott notes, that’s propaganda, not evidence, and understanding who the Sea Peoples really were requires looking well beyond Egypt’s self-serving account. What happened at Hattusa The Hittite empire once controlled vast stretches of Turkey and Syria. The standard story, borrowed largely from Egyptian sources, held that the Sea Peoples burned the Hittite capital, Hattusa, to the ground. Excavations tell a different story: the structures that burned had already been emptied out, their archives moved elsewhere beforehand. That points to something else entirely, that Hattusa’s leadership saw collapse coming and had time to relocate their records before anyone attacked. The Hittites were already buckling under a punishing drought that left them appealing to subject states for grain, on top of trade routes falling apart around them. Some historians, McDermott writes, now argue the fatal blow came not from seaborne raiders but from the Kashka, a rival people from Anatolia’s north who had clashed with the Hittites for generations. Either way, Hattusa’s collapse looks far less like a sudden military defeat and far more like the last stage of a state that was already failing. Cyprus caught in the crossfire The coastal trading city of Ugarit, in modern Syria, has yielded something rarer: personal letters describing the crisis as it happened, including correspondence sent directly to Cyprus, McDermott writes. In one letter, Ugarit’s king warned his counterpart on the island: “Now the ships of the enemy have come. They have been setting fire to my cities and have done harm to the land […] Now if other ships of the enemy turn up, send me a report somehow, so that I will know.” That letter is one of the few surviving eyewitness accounts of the crisis from a Bronze Age ruler to an ally, and it shows Cyprus cast in the role of watchman, asked to report back on enemy ships before they reached Ugarit’s shores. Ugarit did not survive what followed: its buildings were flattened, and arrowheads still litter the site. Troy, which fell under Hittite influence, suffered a similar sacking, an event McDermott says some scholars link to the roots of the Homeric myths. Further south at Ashkelon, in present-day Israel, the picture looks completely different. Archaeologists there found Mycenaean-style pottery, loom weights, and unfamiliar crops, all tied to the Peleset, one of the Sea Peoples groups with roots in the Mycenaean world. Rather than destruction, the evidence points to settlement. DNA testing on Philistine remains found at the site shows ancestry mixing southern European and local Canaanite lines within a couple of generations, evidence more consistent with farming families putting down roots than with an invading army. Greece’s parallel unraveling Mycenae, the palace linked to King Agamemnon in the Iliad and the Odyssey, went up in flames around 1190 BCE, and the palace at Pylos followed not long after. The Sea Peoples have taken much of the blame, but McDermott points to a different explanation favoured by some historians: internal uprisings fuelled by drought, hunger, broken trade, and resentment of ruling elites. It’s just as plausible, he suggests, that some of the people later labelled Sea Peoples were, in fact, Mycenaean Greeks fleeing the very same crises, part of a wider regional unravelling that also pulled Cyprus, sitting astride these same trade routes, into the chaos. A single label, many different realities The Sea Peoples belong to the same turbulent world that shapes Nolan’s film. Homer describes Odysseus as polytropos, “a man of many turns”: part hero, part pirate, part liar, always trying to make it home alive. According to McDermott, the Sea Peoples resist being pinned down in much the same way. In one place they look like raiders and soldiers; in another, like ordinary farmers building new lives. The image of a single, unified enemy may have existed only in the minds of the people they threatened. This article is based on an original analysis by Joshua David McDermott, postdoctoral researcher in Classics and Ancient History at the University of Sydney, first published on The Conversation. Read more: We saw the Odyssey: Nolan loses the plot on the way to Ithaca Subscribe to our Newsletter Latest News Aid group says seven Americans quarantining at Kenya Ebola facility after US travel ban Landslide buries residents in southwest China’s Chongqing Pakistan cargo crash families push for international help to find black boxes On this day: Jazz and blues singer Billie Holiday died in 1959 Cypriots stay in the labour market for 39.5 years, beating EU average Father of British boy who died in Paphos hotel fall expected to be released Maronas cross-examination names deputy police chief in Zavrantonas case Follow en.philenews on Google News and be the first to know all the news about Cyprus and the world.