Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey is haunted by the Sea Peoples, spectral men on the edges of a civilisation teetering on the brink.

This anxiety isn’t just cinematic fiction. The Sea Peoples feature in writing from 1200 BCE, blamed for the collapse of the interconnected world of the Bronze Age (which lasted from roughly 1500 to 1180 BCE). That world collapsed under many crises, seemingly all at once.

In Greece, the grand palaces of Mycenae and Pylos – home to the legendary kings of Homer’s Odyssey – burned down. In modern-day Turkey, the Hittite empire – overlord of Troy – fell apart. Cities from Syria to Cyprus to Canaan were destroyed within years of each other.

Historians now think a web of crises were behind this “systems collapse”: a 300-year megadrought caused famine, trade routes vital to the Bronze Age economy broke down, and people moved (sometimes peacefully, other times bringing conflict).

And throughout accounts from Egypt to Syria, “the Sea Peoples” haunt the writers of letters and grand inscriptions, much like they do Nolan’s The Odyssey.

But who were the real Sea Peoples, and what part did they play in the story of collapse?

Ancient Egypt’s view of the Sea Peoples

We first hear about the Sea Peoples in the boastful inscriptions of the Egyptian pharaohs Merneptah and Ramses III, who ruled from 1213–1203 and 1186–1155 BCE, respectively.

In Ramses’ mortuary temple near the Valley of the Kings near Luxor in Egypt, we learn:

The foreign countries made a conspiracy in their islands........

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