Bronze Age Collapse

Total Ancient Systems Collapse

Returning to our discussion of the Sea Peoples and their invasions, we left off with the Shekelesh and Teresh. From Hittite records we know of a “Shikalayu” mentioned during the reign of Suppiluliuma II as ones “who live on ships”.¹ They are most probably associated with the Sicels, known from their famous island of Sicily.² Sicily, like Sardinia, Crete, and Cyprus, these large, majorly populated islands must have served as a sort of ‘pirate highway’ for seafaring around the Mediterranean during the Bronze Age.

Previously, from the Book of Japheth, we identified Tarshish as “Sardinian/Nuraghic”, but additionally added the caveat that they represent the “Indo-European residents of the Western Isles”. In effect, this also includes Sicily, Corsica, large parts of Italy, and even the Baleares in Spain. Even more important are these same groups connection to Spain itself, with the term “Sephard”, the Hebrew word for Spain, coming specifically from the term Sard, as in a resident of Sardis. Spain, along with the western isles, becomes “Sardis in the West” through progressive colonization by Greeks, Sea Peoples, and Phoenicians. The correlation to the Sherden and Shekelesh on most Egyptian lists - and both being seen as “of the sea” - would imply they were probably islands closely located, or at the very least would end up settling those “isles of the west” affiliated with Tarshish, son of Javan, during the era of Greek colonization.

Confusingly, Sicily actually has two similarly named people: Sicels and Sicani. Sicels in the east, Sicani in the west, the name “Shekel-esh” is obviously nearer to the SicEls than SicAni which has the “ah” sound rather than “eh”. They could be both of these groups, or the Sicani might be separate from the Shekelesh. The Sicels appear to be later inhabitants, while the Sicani are more native. However, another more native group called the Elimyians lived on the island prior to both groups, and were probably the original inhabitants. We could thus claim like the Sards and Sherden who move into Sardinia, assimilating and forming their own primary tribe on the island, the Sicels/Shekelesh and the Sicani do the same to the island of Sicily.

One theory that might help explain this is that the Sicels reportedly spoke an Indo European language.³ This is important, because if the Sicels and Shekelesh are Indo-Europeans, this would posit their language as something like Greek or Luwian. The Elymians seemingly spoke something related to the Italic language family, lining up with those more native Indo-European residents.⁴ Differing from both groups, the Sicani actually speak a “non-Indo European” language, meaning they would better line up with a Hamite group, rather than Japhetite. Tarshish would represent the Greek/Indo-European residents of the isle, while the Hamite contingent would be represented separately.

Could the mysterious pyramids of Sicily be related to these Shekelesh picking up building methods from their time spent in the near east? Or are they related to a Hamite group that always built Pyramids in ages past? This is a crucial theory, and will become clear when we wrap up the section on Caphtorim how all these groups linguistically relate.

Again, another disputed “from the east or west” occurs with the Shekelesh, but this issue applies to most of these sea peoples groups and whether earlier, or later, these people are clearly associated with the island. What direction they came in, how they share a connection, who assimilates into what territory is really not important since the Nations on the Table are all said to intermingle with one another well before the era of Kings and makes no chronological claims.

One possible theory for where the Shekelesh ended up is actually among the Tribe of Issachar, if they weren’t the leaders of the tribe. This theory comes from the name Issachar itself which is synonymous with the term “ish sakar” meaning ‘man of hire’. Likewise, the term Shekelesh can break down into Shekel-esh, or ‘men of the shekel’. Most readers will be familiar with the Shekel as the Hebrew term for a coin, making the word ‘hire’ and ‘shekel’ being explicitly linked with the same root.⁵

The next nation of sea peoples would be the Teresh, who are one of the more poorly understood members of the list. Breaking this term into its parts we get T-R-Sh, eerily similar to T-R-Sh-Sh known as Tarshish from Japheth’s lineage. What I would suggest is probably happening with many of these names is they are taken from proper terms that the sea peoples would use for their own groups based on certain roles. We first laid out this framework with the Karkisa who were known as Archers, and we even saw this with the Egyptian name for Nubia “Ta-Seti” or Land of the Bow. People groups often got their name from their role, and it’s very possible Tarshish, or Teresh represents some kind of seafaring mercenary.

The reason this theory is important is because there is another Japhetite with the T-R-S sequence, which is Tiras - even if the final “S” changes this could be a mere linguistic shift. During our identifications from the Book of Japheth, Tiras was identified with the Tyrrhenians, Pelasgoi, and Etruscans/Latins. Remember, the sea peoples are not “macro” families, but tribal elements that break off from their ‘father’ and all of these groups probably descended and intermixed with one another to form both ancient, and modern identities. Let’s break down some connections for why Tiras fits better than Tarshish, even if they share some mixed identity.

Numerous Linear B inscriptions around the island of Crete reference a toponym “Tu-Ri-So” maintaining that T-R-S sequence we are looking for as an ethnonym for the Teresh. One notable location is the ancient city of Tylissos, known in Linear B as Tu-Li-So. The central “Li” sound easily flips into a “Ri” as is commonly seen in eastern asian accents when speaking english. The people of this town were known from the tablets as Knossos as “Tu-Ri-Si-Ja/Jo”, and the location is fairly close to Knossos itself in the central kingdom of Crete, in the heartland of Minoan territory.

Outside of Crete, this ethnonym seems to be found in the previously mentioned identification for Tiras, Tyrrhenians. For those who have not read the previous book yet, the term might seem confusing, lacking most of the sounds necessary for the sequence. Tyrrhenian was actually the Attic Greek term from the classic era, but in both Ionic and Doric Greek the term is actually “Tursenoi” retaining that important T-R-S sequence, dropping the “ja/jo” from Linear B to imply the people group and replacing it with the greek version “noi”.

The Tursenoi, or Tyrrhenians, were also viewed as Etruscans by the ancient Greeks and Latins alike⁶, with a small language family emerging with its own distinct dialects.⁷ The proposed origin for this term “Tursenoi” probably comes from ‘native’ - in other words, a loan word into Greek that was not Indo-European - word “Túrsis” translating to tower.⁸ Typically this term “Tursenoi” actually means “pirate” in the Greek context which helps affirm the previous theory that these islands served as a sort of pirate chain for sea faring marauders during the Bronze Age Collapse like the Carribean serving as a hub for pirates during the era of New World colonization. Where opportunities arise, so will those seeking to siphon off the profit.

In the previous book we connected them to the Pelasgians, who were the ‘native’ inhabitants of the region before the Indo-European colonization of Europe.⁹ Thucydides actually identifies the Pelasgians alongside the Etruscans/Tursenoi as well as with Lemnian pirates from the Island of Lemnos right outside the Dardanelles, near the Thracian peninsula.¹⁰ This “T-R-S” sequence is even found in “Thracia” to an extent, morning to this modern form through the centuries. This strong connection to Pelasgoi whose ethnonym we will shortly connect to the Peleset helps reaffirm this theory that sea peoples are the proto-populations inhabiting Europe prior to those migrations.

One final theory about the Teresh, who really slot in as the puzzle piece for many of these sea peoples identifications. The Hittite city of Taruiša, in Greek known as Troia, known in English as the famed city of Troy from the heroic myths of the Trojan war. Alternatively the city's name was “Ilion”, which is close to the alternative Hittite term “Wiluša”. The city's prime location guarding the Dardanelles gave it importance throughout much of the Bronze Age, serving as the gateway to the black sea. In effect, Troy was the first major stop for the Indo-Europeans on their conquests of the Greek world, and its fall embedding in the Greek psyche was obviously a record of this momentous shift in power.

The story of the Iliad mostly deals with the invasion of Troy, but Homer’s sequel “The Odyssey” deals with the results of the fall of Troy, importantly the wandering of the hero Odysseus and his ships full of troops as they scatter across the Mediterranean world. In the story, Odysseus even loses his men along the way, possibly with some recording of various bands of mercenaries being hired off by different kings. Eventually he even makes his way to Egypt, being an incredibly strange coincidence that both Odysseus and the Sea Peoples, both a sort of proto-Greek ethnicity, ended up in all the same places.

Returning to Troy, the ethnicity of the city's inhabitants is up for debate, but they do appear to be Luwians during the “Fall of Troy” event between 1180-950 BCE.¹¹ During this period, a wave of foreign immigrants shows up in Troy marking a dramatic cultural shift in the city's walls composed of upright stones, and a style of handmade knobbed pottery known as “Buckelkeramik”. There are theories these groups share a connection to the Phrygian immigrants that settled in sites like Gordion, not far from Troy who exhibit similar cultural styles.¹² In the previous book, Phyrigians were identified with Tubal, unrelated to these sea people groups which makes sense as they arrived during the early waves of Indo-European migrations at the onset of the Greek Dark Age.

Effectively we see the emergence of populations mixed with the native substrate of their regions, among them groups like the Luwians, Estruscans, and Mycenaeans; even the Hittites follow this same pattern given their ethnicity was really an elite population layered on top of an origins native Hatti group. This connection to ‘native’ peoples is even more clear when we bring up that strange connection of these groups to the giants - such as in the case of the Philistines and the Avim - who are essentially themselves a memory of the native populations in the near east.

Post-New Kingdom Egypt, Neo-Hittite states, Greece, Rome and even Israel are all post bronze age civilizations that emerge in the power vacuum of the ancient world. Each one of these states seemingly diverges from their ancestral pasts, while retaining some ethnic element. Like in Israel with the Canaanites, and Giant populations, Greeks viewed their original inhabitants as Mycenaeans and Pelasgoi populations, groups that existed prior to their arrival. The need to ‘continue’ those ancient pasts through modern mythologies, mostly built upon fragmentary evidence no different from how modern scholarship pieces together the fragments of our past to create a cohesive picture that almost certainly fails to encapsulate the breath of the ancient world.

1. Heike Sternberg-el Hotabi: Der Kampf der Seevölker gegen Pharao Ramses III. Rahden 2012, S. 49.

2. Eduard Meyer (1965). "Die großen Wanderungen. Ausgang der mykenischen Zeit, Ende des Chetiterreichs und Niedergang Ägyptens: Die Seevölker und die ethnographischen Probleme. Tyrsener und Achaeer". Geschichte des Altertums. Zweiter Band. Erste Abteilung: Die Zeit der ägyptischen Großmacht. Vol. 4. Darmstadt. pp. 556–558.

3. The basic study is Joshua Whatmough in R.S. Conway, J. Whatmough and S.E. Johnson, The Prae-Italic Dialects of Italy (London 1933) vol. 2:431-500; a more recent study is A. Zamponi, "Il Siculo" in A.L. Prosdocimi, ed., Popoli e civiltà dell'Italia antica, vol. 6 "Lingue e dialetti" (1978949-1012.)

4. Marchesini, Simona (2012). "The Elymian Language". In Tribulato, Olga (ed.). Language and Linguistic Contact in Ancient Sicily. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. pp. 95–114. All scholars agree that Elymian is a language of the Indo-European family (p. 96).

5.  Sandars, N.K. (1978). The Sea Peoples. Warriors of the ancient Mediterranean, 1250-1150 BC. Thames & Hudson.

6. Abulafia, David (2014) [2011]. The great sea - A human history of the Mediterranean. London UK: Penguin Books. p. 145-6.

7. Kluge, Sindy; Salomon, Corinna; Schumacher, Stefan (2013–2018). "Modern research on Raetic". Thesaurus Inscriptionum Raeticarum. Department of Linguistics, University of Vienna.

8. Heubeck, Alfred (1961). Praegraeca: sprachliche Untersuchungen zum vorgriechisch-indogermanischen Substrat. Erlangen. pp. 65ff.

9. Herodotus, Histories, 1.57

10. Thucydides, 4.109

11. J. D. Hawkins/D. F. Easton, "A Hieroglyphic Seal from Troy", Studia Troica 6, pp. 111–118, 1996

12. Jablonka, Peter (2012). "Troy". In Cline, Eric (ed.). The Oxford Handbook of the Bronze Age Aegean. Oxford University Press. pp. 849–861.