Learn › How hieroglyphs work

Who were the Sea Peoples? The raiders who fought Ramesses II, Merneptah and Ramesses III

5 November 2026

The Sea Peoples were bands of raiders, hired fighters and migrants who came by ship and overland to the coasts of the eastern Mediterranean in the 1200s and early 1100s BC. Egyptian texts name about nine of them, among them the Sherden, the Lukka, the Shekelesh and the Peleset. They had no single homeland, king or army. They raided where they could and fought for whoever paid, and the same groups turn up as pirates in one reign and as the pharaoh's own soldiers in the next.

Three pharaohs fought them. Ramesses II beat a pirate fleet early in his reign, Merneptah beat them as allies of a Libyan invasion, and Ramesses III fought the great land and sea battles that his temple at Medinet Habu shows. The whole story comes from the winners' side, from Egyptian walls and from clay letters written by the kings they attacked.

Pirates raided the coasts a century before Ramesses II

The first of these names turns up in the Amarna letters, the clay tablets that foreign kings and Egypt's vassals sent to the pharaohs around 1350 BC. In one of them the king of Alashiya, on Cyprus, answers an Egyptian complaint about raids. He says the Lukka are seizing villages in his own country every year.

Rib-Hadda, the ruler of Byblos on the coast of today's Lebanon, mentions the Sherden in his letters too. These were small groups of armed men looking for loot or for work as soldiers. For the next hundred years they stayed a nuisance at the edges of the great kingdoms.

Ramesses II caught a Sherden fleet and put the men in his guard

In his second year, about 1278 BC, Ramesses II was ready for the Sherden when they came raiding along the coast. A stela he set up at Tanis boasts of the victory. In Kenneth Kitchen's translation it calls them "the Sherden of rebellious mind, whom none could ever fight against", who "sailed in, in warships from the midst of the Sea". The king, it says, plundered them and carried them off to Egypt.

Ramesses did not waste good fighters. Three years later, at the battle of Kadesh against the Hittites in 1274 BC, his inscriptions say Sherden served in his personal guard. In the Kadesh reliefs, carved at Abu Simbel, the Ramesseum and other temples, they stand out by their horned helmets, round shields and long swords.

Read Ramesses II's cartouches

Merneptah beat them as hired swords of a Libyan king

Ramesses II's son Merneptah came to the throne an old man. In his fifth year, about 1208 BC, Meryey, son of Ded, a chief of the Libyans, marched into the western Delta with his family, his herds and a band of northern allies. Merneptah's account at Karnak names them as the Ekwesh, Teresh, Lukka, Sherden and Shekelesh.

The two armies met at a place called Perire and fought for six hours. Merneptah claimed 6,000 enemy dead and 9,000 prisoners, and Meryey ran. The allies had come with a Libyan army that brought its women and children, which reads more like a people moving house than a raid.

See Merneptah's name in hieroglyphs

The kingdoms north of Egypt fell around 1200 BC

Over the next twenty or thirty years the Hittite empire in Anatolia broke apart, and many palaces in Greece, Cyprus and the Levant burned. At the port of Ugarit, in today's Syria, archaeologists found a letter from its last king, Ammurapi, to the king of Alashiya. He writes that "the enemy's ships came", his cities were burned, and his troops and chariots were away in Hatti while all his ships were in the land of Lukka. "The seven ships of the enemy that came here inflicted much damage upon us."

In Greece the palaces of the Mycenaeans, the kingdoms of the heroes in Homer's stories, burned one after another, Pylos among them. The fire at Pylos baked its clay tablets hard, and they are among the last texts in Linear B, the Mycenaean script. After the fall the Greeks stopped writing for about 400 years, until they took up the alphabet of the Phoenicians. Whether raiders like the Sea Peoples set those fires, or earthquakes, revolts and hunger brought the palaces down, historians still argue.

Ugarit was destroyed soon afterwards, in the 1180s BC by most estimates, and never rebuilt. Some scholars date its end a few years earlier.

Ramesses III stopped them on land and at sea

The biggest attack came in the eighth year of Ramesses III, about 1177 BC. His inscription at Medinet Habu says the foreign countries "made a conspiracy in their isles" and that no land stood before them, from Hatti to Cyprus. It names five peoples marching together: the Peleset, Tjeker, Shekelesh, Denyen and Weshesh.

His army met one force on land in Djahy, on the coast of Canaan. In the reliefs the Peleset and Tjeker warriors bring ox carts loaded with women and children. A second force came by ship to the mouths of the Nile, where Egyptian archers shot them down from the banks and from their own ships. The reliefs show the enemy with feathered headdresses and horned helmets, their ships with birds' heads on the prows.

Read the sea battle at Medinet Habu

The beaten raiders became Egypt's soldiers and neighbours

A long papyrus written for Ramesses IV in his father's name, now called Papyrus Harris I, says Ramesses III settled captive Sea Peoples in strongholds bound to him. They may have been garrison towns in Canaan. The Sherden went on serving in Egypt's army, and later records of the 20th Dynasty list Sherden holding farmland in Egypt.

The Peleset are usually taken to be the Philistines of the Bible, who held Gaza, Ashkelon and Ashdod on the coast of Canaan. In 2019 a team led by Michal Feldman read the DNA of ten people buried at Ashkelon. Four infants from the first Philistine houses carried European ancestry that the older Canaanites lacked, and within about 200 years it had faded into the local mix.

Scholars still argue over where they came from

Egyptian scribes wrote the names letter by letter, as they did all foreign names, and added the throw stick (T14) and the three hills (N25), the signs for foreigners and foreign lands. Some groups are called "of the sea", n pꜣ ym, using ym, a word for the sea borrowed from the languages of Canaan.

The Lukka are widely placed in Lycia, in south-west Turkey. Other links rest on the sound of the names: the Sherden with Sardinia, the Shekelesh with Sicily, the Denyen with Homer's Danaoi. Each has its supporters and its doubters. The Sardinian bronzes that look like Sherden warriors are centuries younger than the Egyptian texts.

Older books cast the Sea Peoples as the invaders who ended the Bronze Age. Recent work sees them more as refugees and opportunists in a crisis already under way. Eric Cline, in his book 1177 BC (2014), blames drought, famine, earthquakes and broken trade that struck the linked kingdoms together, with the raiders as one part of it.

Throw stick Three hills

Questions

Did Thutmose fight the Sea Peoples?

No. Thutmose III, who ruled from about 1479 to 1425 BC, fought his wars in Canaan and Syria, winning at Megiddo among other places. That was more than a century before any of these groups appears in a text, and his father Thutmose II died before him.

Why are they called the Sea Peoples?

The name is modern. The French Egyptologist Emmanuel de Rougé used "peoples of the sea" in 1855, after the Egyptian texts that call some of them "of the sea", and Gaston Maspero made it popular later in the century.

Did the Sea Peoples ever conquer Egypt?

No. Egypt beat every attack its records describe. Within a few decades of Ramesses III, though, Egypt had lost its lands in Canaan, and the New Kingdom ended in 1069 BC.

Where can you see the Sea Peoples today?

On the outer north wall of Medinet Habu in Luxor, which shows the sea battle. Merneptah's account of his Libyan war is carved on a wall at Karnak.

Glossary

dynasty: A line of kings counted together, usually one family. Egyptologists number Egypt's kings in about 30 dynasties, following the priest Manetho.
Egyptologist: A scholar who studies ancient Egypt: its language, writing, objects, buildings and history.
New Kingdom: Egypt's age of empire, about 1550 to 1069 BC, the time of Hatshepsut, Akhenaten, Tutankhamun and Ramesses II.
papyrus: A writing sheet made from strips of the papyrus reed laid in two crossing layers and pressed. Sheets were glued into long rolls.
pharaoh: The king of Egypt. The word comes from per-aa, "great house", a name for the palace that came to mean the king himself in the New Kingdom.
relief: A carving on a flat surface. In raised relief the background is cut away. In sunk relief the figures are cut into the stone.
scribe: A person trained to read and write, who kept accounts, wrote letters and copied texts. Few Egyptians could write, and scribes were well respected.
stela: An upright stone slab carved with words and pictures, set up in tombs and temples or to mark a border.
temple: The house of a god, where priests served the god's statue. Temples for dead kings kept up their offerings after death.