s III at Medinet Habu. These tablets were a written chronicle of his war victories. Most knowledge about the “Sea Peoples” comes from these tablets. The term “Sea Peoples” was coined by an error according to Christopher Robbins. He writes that a French scholar named Gaston Maspero shortened the term to “peuples de la mer” in 1870 from “les peuples de la mer mediterranee”. This phrase now misleads people to believe that the “Sea Peoples” lived on the sea or on islands, when in fact all people living near the Mediterranean Sea are referred to as “Mediterranean”. Robbins states that this mistake was due to Maspero’s misinterpretation of the inscriptions at Medinet Habu. Maspero concluded that the “Sea Peoples” were a result of mass migrations (Vlkerwanderungen) that came by both land and sea. Michael Woods stated in, In Search of the Trojan War episode 6 that, “Greek tradition and archaeology show that there were migrations of Greek speaking people to these same places at this time” (219). This supports Gaston Maspero’s belief that the “Sea Peoples” were a product of migrations, because it sets the time-period. He then declares on page 218 of In Search of the Trojan War that, “…some of the peoples of the sea were migrants, many were demonstrably traditional pirates.” The mass migration hypothesis was accepted because no other sensible solution was available and so it became the accepted explanation. Immanuel Velikovsky writes “A modern scholar expressed this very view at her conviction that these armies were a well-organized state and not migrating hordes uprooted from their domicile”(120). He is referring to their skill in war, a group of wandering migrates would not be able to destroy the Hittite Kingdom and bring about a Dark Age, without sufficient training. Considerable new...
