It’s popularly suggested that a group of marauding seafarers referred to as the Sea Peoples contributed to the collapse of major cities in the Late Bronze Age in their raid of Eastern Mediterranean trading centers. Were the Sea Peoples really responsible? No, or at least not for the Southern Levant, says Jesse Millek, this year’s winner of the Sean W. Dever Memorial Prize for his paper “Sea Peoples, Philistines, and the Destruction of Cities: A Critical Examination of Destruction Layers ‘Caused’ by the ‘Sea Peoples.’” In his paper, presented in November 2014 at a conference titled “The Sea Peoples […]
