The Ethnicity of the Sea Peoples - RePub - Erasmus Universiteit ...

About the origin of the Shekelesh we have only circumstantial
evidence that their homeland is unlikely to be
situated in Anatolia, as the last of the Hittite great kings,
Suppiluliumas II, is unfamiliar with them. As opposed to
this negative evidence, an association with Sicily in the
central Mediterranean can be underlined by the fact that
the latter island was in contact with Greece, Crete, and
Cyprus during the Late Bronze Age. A representative of
the Shekelesh involved in trade with Cyprus and the eastern
Mediterranean singles himself out as mastering the
Cypro-Minoan script and the Luwian language, but this
does not help us very much in determining his native Sicilian
language about which we only know that in the archaic
period it was closely related to Oscan. For the question
whether the Sicilians had a pronounced idea about their
ethnicity we can only draw back to the fact that the Egyptians
depicted them with a special type of headdress, the
“nach hinten gebogene Mutze”, which, to say the least, is
meagre evidence.
The identification of the Weshesh with the Oscans is
crucial for our understanding of the catastrophic events at
the end of the Bronze Age. The invasion of Italy by bearers
of the European Urnfield culture, which we have seen
reason to identify with the speakers of the Italic dialects or
languages Osco-Umbrian and Latin-Faliscan, entails a true
mass migration which caused serious disruption of peoples
living in the region, whose displacement in turn formed the
“prime mover” for what we call the upheavals of the Sea
Peoples. Even though the Oscans may have been numerically
a relatively small party among the coalition of the
Sea Peoples, they nonetheless may be considered like the
leaven in the Biblical bread. Thus the ships of the Sea
Peoples with bird-head devices at both the bow and the
stern of a typically Urnfield type, the spread of handmade
barbarian ware of proto-Villanovan Italian or European
Urnfield backgrounds, and the growing popularity of the
rite of cremation during and after the catastrophic events
may be attributed to the influence of our Oscan participants.
Considering their highly specific cultural and linguistic
traits, the Oscans are likely to be considered a
coherent ethnic entity according to our protohistoric criteria.
By means of conclusion, we seem to be confronted
with various ethnic groups, each having their own specific
material culture – though Late Helladic IIIC1b appears to
be a combining factor, being attested for the homeland of
almost every Sea People, from western Anatolia (Pitane
119
and Larisa Phrikonis) in the east to Sardinia (nuraghe Antigori)
in the west – and language. That these ethnic groups
were indeed cohesive entities appears from the fact that,
after their abortive attempt to conquer Egypt, they settled
separately in various locations in the Levant: the Peleset or
Philistines in their pentapolis, the Tjeker or Teukroi in
Dor, the Sherden or Sardinians in Akko, Denye(n) or Dan
in Joppa and later in Laish, European Urnfielders likely to
be identified with the Weshesh or Oscans in Hamath, and
Ekwesh or Akhaians in the Cilician plain. Nevertheless,
this conglomerate of cultures and languages was able to
work together very effectively for some time, as the downfall
of palatial empires caused by them may illustrate. In
order to demonstrate that a multi-lingual coalition is a priori
possible, one may point to the fact that the Trojan side
in Homeros’ Iliad consisted of a multi-lingual coalition as
well. 606
In his Ethnicity in eastern Mediterranean protohistory:
Reflections on theory and method (forthc.), chapter
6, Wim van Binsbergen formulates three hypotheses
which are of relevance to our subject.
HYPOTHESIS 1. In the Late Bronze Age, by the time of
the appearance of the Sea Peoples, the geographical
space of the eastern Mediterranean was ethnically
structured in this sense, that an overall system of ethnic
classification was generally known and generally
subscribed to.
The validity of this hypothesis can be underlined by
the fact that some of the groups of the Sea Peoples are referred
to by the same ethnonym in various sources, like the
Ekwesh as A®®iyawa in Hittite and Shekelesh as Šikaly
in Ugaritic and as Sikeri- in Cypro-Minoan: this proves
that we are not dealing with the whim of an individual
Egyptian scribe, but a classificatory system with a wider
geographical range shared by the Egyptians with the Hittites,
Ugaritians, and Cyprians. Even the fact that there are
competing indications for the same ethnic group, like in
case of the Egyptian preference of Tanayu or Denye(n)
“Danaoi” over Ekwesh “Akhaians”, or their indication of
the Trojans as Drdny alongside Tjeker does not undermine
such a conclusion, as it rather signals the sophistication of
this classificatory system. As to the origin of the different
ethnonyms, it is interesting to note that Sherden and Sheke-
606 Iliad II, 804; IV, 437-8. Note that in this respect the title of my
book The Language of the Sea Peoples is oversimplifying the reality.