The Odyssey: Who Were the Sea People and Why Are They So Scary? | Den of Geek

This article contains major The Odyssey spoilers.

One of the most chilling antagonists and nightmares offered in Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey is neither sirens nor the cyclops, the hospitality of Circe or the dreaded gates Hades. Instead it’s a whisper, a rumor spread across the wind, from Odysseus’ dear and distant Ithaca to the great halls of Sparta. It is vague and ominous tales of “the Sea People.” These apparent strangers emerging from parts unknown along the Aegean and Ionian Seas are spoken about in the movie as an existential threat greater than old King Priam of Troy could ever hope to muster.

Yet come the movie’s end, the weary and grayed Odysseus played by Matt Damon offers a more ominous theory about who the Sea People are and why they will mark the ruin of the Ancient Mycenaean civilization we witness throughout the story. It’s a curious and somewhat surprising innovation since, unlike nearly everything else in Nolan’s Odyssey, the Sea People of the film appear nowhere in Homer.

While Nolan’s film is a surprisingly dense retelling of nearly every misadventure Odysseus has on his way home to Penelope (Anne Hathaway), the Sea People are from real history, as opposed to pure myth. And to this day, many historians and classists debate whether they caused or were symptoms of the catastrophic events that brought about the collapse of the Bronze Age and ushered centuries of darkness into Greece. They certainly spelled doom for several of the ancient Mycenaeans’ greatest neighbors, which ironically, has roots in the Trojan War as well…

The Real Sea Peoples and the Ruin of the World

During the Bronze Age in which The Odyssey is set, the city-state of Ugarit was one of the greatest coastal powers along the eastern Mediterranean. Located in what is modern day Syria, it was neighbors to the Hittites and Egyptians during the New Kingdom’s height, and was a respected port by the Ancient Greeks during their alleged Age of Heroes.

They were also the first to fall.

“The enemy ships are already here,” the last King of Ugarit desperately fretted in a message intended for his counterpart in what is modern day Cyprus. “They have set fire to my towns and done very great damage in my countryside.” The message was never delivered. Instead it was discovered by modern archaeologists still in the rubble of the kiln in which it was being fired onto a clay tablet. But by that point, it was already too late. The king’s city—which was left undefended when he sent armies to help another ally being invaded by people from the sea—was sacked and torn asunder, its history left in ruins. Ugarit was never rebuilt.

This is one of many accounts that historians and archaeologists have relied on to piece together the mystery of the Sea Peoples, a term which was adapted by 19th century French Egyptologists to describe all the ominous accounts in Egyptian texts about various naval forces and invaders that sought to conspire against the armies of the pharaohs during the 19th and 20th dynasties. Ugarit would hardly be the only city to fall to this threat either.

As written in Toby Wilkinson’s lively popular history, The Rise and Fall of Ancient Egypt, “All along the eastern seaboard of the Mediterranean, cities were being sacked and torched, harbors burned and looted, entire nations laid low. While coastal communities had been harried by pirates for decades, this new onslaught was of an entirely different order of magnitude. Most frightening of all, it had come out of the blue, the sighting of enemy ships on the western horizon being the first warning of an impending attack… As Egypt watched from afar, great cities and civilizations were reduced to rubble, and the cultural achievements of centuries went up in smoke.”

Indeed, the death of Ugarit was foreboding enough, but one of Egypt and the Mycenaean Greeks’ greatest rivals, and occasional ally, the Hittites, were brought also to ruin by invaders from the sea, with the Hittite ruler’s final urgent diplomatic messages likewise writing of fighting a sea-borne enemy. Hattusa, the seat of power for the Hittite Empire, was completely decimated and the grain storehouses emptied bare. Afterward all written historical records of the Hittites simply stop.

To be clear, there is scholarly debate to this day whether the Sea Peoples actually caused the catastrophic ruin of the Bronze Age or whether they were a symptom of it. The Hittites, for one, were suffering heavily from droughts before invasion, and being cut off from neighbors who were also sacked by the mysterious ships from the western Mediterranean meant entire economies reliant on trade might have collapsed before any city was put to the torch. And if the Sea People were themselves likely fleeing drought or famine, they might have just been a symptom of a larger ecological collapse.

Be that as it may, there is strong archaeological evidence, and written records in Egypt, which suggest invaders from the sea exacerbated or instigated widespread destruction, including in the Mycenaean city-states glorified by Homer. By the 12th century BCE, the Mycenaeans had a written language and network of kingdoms that could supplant the Minoan civilization on Crete and rival the Hittites to the Near East, including, possibly, the city we now call Troy. Yet like those neighbors, they too suffered invasion, economic ruin, and finally a collapse so catastrophic that the Greeks would enter a three-century period of illiteracy and regression that scholars now call (or fight against calling) “the Greek Dark Ages.”

Interestingly, a major reason we have a decent idea about this catastrophic ruin is because of the one empire these invaders could not bring low. As proudly boasted upon on the walls of Mediate Habu, a mortuary temple for Ramses III on the West Bank of the Nile outside of Luxor, as well as on the walls of ancient Thebes’ Karnak complex, various people “from the sea” attempted to invade Egypt on several occasions, including along the Nile Delta in the 12th century BCE. The Egyptians, however, lured the invaders’ apparently greater and more advanced naval force into the narrow mouth of the Delta, and obliterated these ships with archers, and capsized them with grappling hooks, leading to mass drownings. The survivors were enslaved.

Where Did They Come From?

The term Sea Peoples, emphasis on the plurality, is again a modern creation by 19th century Egyptologists who were using it as a catch-all for various tribes and invaders, some mysterious and some known, during the 12th and even 13th centuries BCE. In actual Egyptian texts, they were referred to as “of/from the sea,” and they included among their ranks the Peleset, a possible forerunner to the Philistines who settled in biblical Canaan. There were also the Sheridan, who probably hailed from Sardinia and parts of Greece, not to mention possible Aegean Greeks referred to as the Denyen. There is also evidence to believe some of these seafaring nomads hailed from the Anatolian peninsula in what is modern day Turkey, and others from the Etruscan civilization in Bronze Age Italy.

The truth is that the exact origin, or origins, of who the lone surviving Egyptian civilization passes down to us as “people of the sea” remains a great mystery. However, we do know that the entire Mediterranean underwent nearly a century of on/off drought and famines in the 12th century BCE. Thus an emerging popular theory is that many of the Sea Peoples were simply distant cultures—possibly the Etruscans or maybe further from western Europe—who sailed east in search of fertile and richer lands, taking food and wealth by force. Wilkinson writes they brought with them women, children, and ox-drawn carts, suggesting a mass migration. This in turn might have exacerbated the shaky economies of cultures like the Greek Mycenaeans, whose reliance on trade was already stressed by the droughts of the period.

Intriguingly, this idea is given some credence since a 2019 genetic study of skeletons from the Philistine city of Ashkelon proved there was common European DNA along the Levant (modern day Lebanon, Israel, and Jordan). This suggests there was some degree of exodus out of southern Europe near or during the Bronze Age collapse.

Who They Are in Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey

The above is an overview of why the so-called Sea Peoples were so ominous in history, but their inclusion in Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey seems to represent something else. Throughout the film, there are suggestions that like in Homer’s source material text, the right of guests as well as hosts is under threat in the times following the Trojan War. The cyclops is a cruel host to the Greeks he finds hiding inside his cave, but the suitors who would seek to marry Penelope and steal the home of Odysseus and his son Telemachus (Tom Holland) also take advantage of the Ithaca’s formal recognition of guests’ rights (or “Zeus’ law” in the film).

As the movie progresses, what we are witnessing is no less than a collapse of civic values and respect for Zeus’ law, as well as Greeks for their fellow man. At the beginning of the story, Telemachus scoffs at his mother for suggesting their house or civilization could ever come to ruin. Look at their great home! But it is in that exact house Odysseus must stain with the blood of usurpers and pretenders who drink his family’s wine, eat their meat, and yet would not dare share it with a starving beggar when Odysseus arrives in disguise.

Odysseus ultimately surmises to Penelope that all these stories about raiders from the sea are not mysterious foreign invaders: it is the ruined and scarred survivors of the Trojan War returning home, devoid of their civility and humanity. Worse, it is a new generation inspired by the utter depravity Odysseus showed the Trojans by offering a gift of peace as a pretext for mass rape and slaughter.

We are the Sea People, the movie all but states.

This rather cutely ties into the debate of the Sea People’s origins, including some scholarship that believes some of the tribes the Egyptians named were of Greek origin. Furthermore, while the existence of a historical city of Troy is agreed upon, some have speculated the actual city-state, a vassal of the Hittites, was destroyed by the Sea Peoples. But that’s all Greek in Nolan’s movie!

It all gets thematically to Nolan’s greater point: the collapse of civilization comes from within, and from the corruption and erosion of literal civility. One need not squint too hard and see parallels to today in Robert Pattinson Antinous, a rich man’s son who buys his way out of military service and prances and pretends to be a great warrior while trying to steal another man’s wife. He is the epitome of civic values gone to rot.