Just who were the Sea Peoples who played a major role in the history of many famous nations of Antiquity?
Hellenes?
We have the ethnicity debate constantly on this forum, and with 'Greek' in particular it gets messy. The Sea Peoples existed around 1200 BC. Homer, writing about 700 BC, never calls the 'Greeks' Hellenes, but has various names for them such as Achaeans and Danaans: the Hellenes do exist, but they're just one of many tribes, and the fact that Homer feels able to put them in almost as an aside, with no comment on their name, strongly suggests that even at his time it wasn't a collective noun for 'Greeks'. Herodotus wrote around 450 BC, and he does use the word, but all that it denotes is speaking the Greek language, and it's significant that he's using it after the Persian Wars, which are the first time that we see anyone talking about a common 'Hellenic' identity as if it exists or means anything. Even into the Roman period, you have people born in Syria whose mother tongue is Aramaic arguing that learning to speak Greek like Plato makes them as 'Hellenic' as the next person, and the eternal use and abuse of the label by powerful Greeks and Romans for their own ends. Being 'Greek' as we understand it, as an ethnic and national category, is more securely dated as a construct of the nineteenth century than a Classical one. Suffice to say, then, that asking questions like 'were the Sea Peoples Hellenes?' is barking up the wrong tree.
The Sea Peoples themselves are tricky to pin down. What we know is that almost every major centre known to have existed in the Eastern Mediterranean outside Egypt was destroyed by fire at some point in half a century or so on either side of 1200 BC. In about 1185, we have an Egyptian record saying that the Pharoah met a horde of various peoples in boats, who had destroyed many cities, and defeated them comprehensively. Archaeologists of a slightly older school, who were more ready than most are today to look for migrations in history (largely because they assumed that any large change in culture must be explained by a replacement of people), took him at his word, and identified the 'Sea Peoples' as a mysterious force of migrants, and blamed them for just about every burnt city in the area.
Unfortunately, the truth is probably not quite that exciting. For one thing, it's rarely a good idea to take a ruler's propaganda entirely at face value. We do know that the Hittite Empire, under a great deal of pressure from various sides, eventually collapsed in about 1210 BC, and its heartland on the Anatolian plateau was hit by famine: by the time the enemy armies actually got to the capital at Hattusa, it was already empty. These people needed to go somewhere, and many seem to have ended up on the coast in Cilicia and Phoenecia, where several turned to piracy. These seem to me to have been the 'Sea Peoples'. There's certainly no evidence for large-scale migration into Greece, where these people are supposed to have ended up - we've known since the 1950s that the Greek language was broadly the same between the high point of the Bronze Age and the time of Homer, so it's far more likely that the changes in culture and manufacture that we see come from internal reasons rather than new people coming in en masse.
This leaves the issue of burning cities in Greece and Crete, where just about every urban centre seems to have been destroyed at this time. The old interpretation of it being the direct handiwork of the Sea Peoples doesn't really hold water: the walls of a citadel like Mycenae were huge, the societies by all accounts militaristic, and it seems unlikely that coastal raiders would be able to have such stunning success in all cases. However, this isn't to say that they had nothing to do with it. These prehistoric centres had palaces at their centres, ruled by kings who exerted influence over local strongmen by giving them gifts - the bronze to make weapons and armour depended on copper and tin that came from Syria and Anatolia, and there are plenty of examples from tombs of ivory goods (the raw materials for which came up the Nile or from India), gold and Near Eastern jewellery being used as markers of prestige. They got these goods through long-distance personal networks of exchange - the Uluburun Shipwreck gives an example of the sort of shipment. This is a classic example of a 'gift economy' - social status demands that you repay a gift with an equal or bigger one, and failing to do so puts you in the other person's debt. We even have a letter from a Hittite monarch complaining to a Greek one that he was being too slow to requite a particular gift.
So we have quite a neatly-balanced system operating (perhaps quite briefly) until about 1200, and Hittite collapse totally ruined it. On the one hand, the personal contacts were gone, and the powerful Near Eastern monarchs with whom the Greek leaders had been making exchanges were replaced by people who did not know them. On the other, there were now a huge number of pirates sailing around the Eastern Mediterranean, making seaborne gift exchanges hugely more difficult. As if to add to a perfect storm, this was also a time when new shipbuilding and navigational techniques were developed, allowing pirates to build ships that could chase slower merchantmen and merchants to sail all the way from the Levant to the Atlantic via Cyprus, Crete and Sicily without stopping in Greece - correspondingly, Near Eastern people start going off Greek goods in favour of more exotic things from the Atlantic. So the Greek kings now found that they couldn't get hold of the shiny, exotic goods that they needed to give out in order to keep their followers loyal. It's not difficult to imagine that they attacked each other to get at other cities' stockpiles of bronze and treasure, but eventually simply ended up abandoning their palaces. With no exotic goods, there was no reason for most of the people employed by the kings - goldsmiths, ivory workers and the scribes who kept track of industries of that sort - to stick around, and it seems that many people simply took to herding animals.
This is (necessarily) a long explanation, so I'll try to summarise it. The Sea Peoples may have been indirectly responsible for the general mess at the end of the Bronze Age, but only because they contributed to the great upset of the economic system on which power in the 'Greek' world depended. Cities were certainly destroyed, but this had various causes, and at least in some cases was simply a matter of a city (actually little more than a royal palace, along with homes and workplaces for the people who worked for the palace or for those who did) burning down because nobody was left in them. The Egyptians may well have put two and two together and assumed that the pirates who landed in their territory were responsible for burning the cities, and they may well have told them so in order to intimidate them, or the Pharaoh might have said so in order to make his victory look more impressive.
Homer's dating is controversial to say the least - I think 700 may be a touch too late, you're right, but 1000 seems a bit too early as well. Certainly the process of standardising the epics cannot have begun before the 8th century, and was only really finished in the 6th - bear in mind it's not absolutely certain how far we are dealing with a single 'poet' here and how far it's better to imagine 'him' as a series of compilers.
We have the ethnicity debate constantly on this forum, and with 'Greek' in particular it gets messy. The Sea Peoples existed around 1200 BC. Homer, writing about 700 BC, never calls the 'Greeks' Hellenes, but has various names for them such as Achaeans and Danaans: the Hellenes do exist, but they're just one of many tribes, and the fact that Homer feels able to put them in almost as an aside, with no comment on their name, strongly suggests that even at his time it wasn't a collective noun for 'Greeks'. Herodotus wrote around 450 BC, and he does use the word, but all that it denotes is speaking the Greek language, and it's significant that he's using it after the Persian Wars, which are the first time that we see anyone talking about a common 'Hellenic' identity as if it exists or means anything. Even into the Roman period, you have people born in Syria whose mother tongue is Aramaic arguing that learning to speak Greek like Plato makes them as 'Hellenic' as the next person, and the eternal use and abuse of the label by powerful Greeks and Romans for their own ends. Being 'Greek' as we understand it, as an ethnic and national category, is more securely dated as a construct of the nineteenth century than a Classical one. Suffice to say, then, that asking questions like 'were the Sea Peoples Hellenes?' is barking up the wrong tree.
The Sea Peoples themselves are tricky to pin down. What we know is that almost every major centre known to have existed in the Eastern Mediterranean outside Egypt was destroyed by fire at some point in half a century or so on either side of 1200 BC. In about 1185, we have an Egyptian record saying that the Pharoah met a horde of various peoples in boats, who had destroyed many cities, and defeated them comprehensively. Archaeologists of a slightly older school, who were more ready than most are today to look for migrations in history (largely because they assumed that any large change in culture must be explained by a replacement of people), took him at his word, and identified the 'Sea Peoples' as a mysterious force of migrants, and blamed them for just about every burnt city in the area.
Unfortunately, the truth is probably not quite that exciting. For one thing, it's rarely a good idea to take a ruler's propaganda entirely at face value. We do know that the Hittite Empire, under a great deal of pressure from various sides, eventually collapsed in about 1210 BC, and its heartland on the Anatolian plateau was hit by famine: by the time the enemy armies actually got to the capital at Hattusa, it was already empty. These people needed to go somewhere, and many seem to have ended up on the coast in Cilicia and Phoenecia, where several turned to piracy. These seem to me to have been the 'Sea Peoples'. There's certainly no evidence for large-scale migration into Greece, where these people are supposed to have ended up - we've known since the 1950s that the Greek language was broadly the same between the high point of the Bronze Age and the time of Homer, so it's far more likely that the changes in culture and manufacture that we see come from internal reasons rather than new people coming in en masse.
This leaves the issue of burning cities in Greece and Crete, where just about every urban centre seems to have been destroyed at this time. The old interpretation of it being the direct handiwork of the Sea Peoples doesn't really hold water: the walls of a citadel like Mycenae were huge, the societies by all accounts militaristic, and it seems unlikely that coastal raiders would be able to have such stunning success in all cases. However, this isn't to say that they had nothing to do with it. These prehistoric centres had palaces at their centres, ruled by kings who exerted influence over local strongmen by giving them gifts - the bronze to make weapons and armour depended on copper and tin that came from Syria and Anatolia, and there are plenty of examples from tombs of ivory goods (the raw materials for which came up the Nile or from India), gold and Near Eastern jewellery being used as markers of prestige. They got these goods through long-distance personal networks of exchange - the Uluburun Shipwreck gives an example of the sort of shipment. This is a classic example of a 'gift economy' - social status demands that you repay a gift with an equal or bigger one, and failing to do so puts you in the other person's debt. We even have a letter from a Hittite monarch complaining to a Greek one that he was being too slow to requite a particular gift.
So we have quite a neatly-balanced system operating (perhaps quite briefly) until about 1200, and Hittite collapse totally ruined it. On the one hand, the personal contacts were gone, and the powerful Near Eastern monarchs with whom the Greek leaders had been making exchanges were replaced by people who did not know them. On the other, there were now a huge number of pirates sailing around the Eastern Mediterranean, making seaborne gift exchanges hugely more difficult. As if to add to a perfect storm, this was also a time when new shipbuilding and navigational techniques were developed, allowing pirates to build ships that could chase slower merchantmen and merchants to sail all the way from the Levant to the Atlantic via Cyprus, Crete and Sicily without stopping in Greece - correspondingly, Near Eastern people start going off Greek goods in favour of more exotic things from the Atlantic. So the Greek kings now found that they couldn't get hold of the shiny, exotic goods that they needed to give out in order to keep their followers loyal. It's not difficult to imagine that they attacked each other to get at other cities' stockpiles of bronze and treasure, but eventually simply ended up abandoning their palaces. With no exotic goods, there was no reason for most of the people employed by the kings - goldsmiths, ivory workers and the scribes who kept track of industries of that sort - to stick around, and it seems that many people simply took to herding animals.
This is (necessarily) a long explanation, so I'll try to summarise it. The Sea Peoples may have been indirectly responsible for the general mess at the end of the Bronze Age, but only because they contributed to the great upset of the economic system on which power in the 'Greek' world depended. Cities were certainly destroyed, but this had various causes, and at least in some cases was simply a matter of a city (actually little more than a royal palace, along with homes and workplaces for the people who worked for the palace or for those who did) burning down because nobody was left in them. The Egyptians may well have put two and two together and assumed that the pirates who landed in their territory were responsible for burning the cities, and they may well have told them so in order to intimidate them, or the Pharaoh might have said so in order to make his victory look more impressive.
With Troy being passed as legend of something having happened in older times, and set pretty much in the Mycenian period, it would be impossible to have Homer or his epics held as the foundation of Greek culture if he was not that much older than people such as Solon the Athenian or Thales or the rest of the sages, who are 8th-7th century BC
Remember that it was not a similar case to Virgil, who everyone knew was composing fiction about a mythical story of origins for Rome.
Homer afaik is always regarded as the oldest Greek poet, and then appear the various lyrical poets, and Hesiod with his theology, and then the sages and philosophers, mathematicians, attic drama and so on.
They might not have had an opinion about when he lived at all. It might have been only later that he became viewed as so important and foundational, and (therefore) viewed as earlier. By comparison, Shakespeare was not generally considered an unusually great playwright until the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries; his importance as the central figure of English literature was a later invention. Maybe the same thing happened with Homer, and so the legends of his date and his personal characteristics e.g. blindness arose quite a bit later. Who can tell?
By the same token, the English and Scots are the same people. Again without wishing to open the colossal can of worms, all identities are based on shared characteristics, but you can't infer them from them. The process of forming a common identity necessarily involves people, who are similar in certain respects but different in others, deciding that the ways in which they are similar are more important than the ways that they are different. Ethnicities do not exist unless people say that they do.