[rnoorda]

If anyone's interested in the Sea Peoples and the Late Bronze Age, I recommend 1177 B.C.: The Year Civilization Collapsed by Eric H. Cline. It gives a great overview of the primary sources and evidences for the factors leading to the Late Bronze Age collapse, including the role the Sea Peoples may have played as both a cause and symptom of larger societal issues.

[Khaine]

He also did a great presentation on this, which is on YouTube here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bRcu-ysocX4&pp=ygUSZXJpYyBoI...

[mhuffman]

I have seen this video before and can confirm he makes a 1+ hour powerpoint presentation pretty engaging.

[PretzelPirate]

His follow up book, "After 1177 B.C.: The Survival of Civilizations", comes out on April 16: https://press.princeton.edu/books/hardcover/9780691192130/af...

[perrygeo]

In the decades before 1177 BC, there were eight empires on the Mediterranean. After, there were three barely-surviving city-states. That the "sea people" came into the picture just as things collapsed is not a coincidence. They were largely the desperate displaced people from fallen civilizations, both victims and agents of violence, acting in a feedback loop. It took centuries to recover; there's a reason it's called the Greek Dark Ages.

[namaria]

I also have a strong feeling that this collapse and the roving sea peoples are what the Illiad narrates. Or at least the body of traditional oral lyric poetry it's inspired on.

[verisimi]

I have to wonder, what primary sources there could be. I would be amazed if there were any.

[Khaine]

At that time, lots of the civilisations wrote on clay tablets, and as their cities burned their clay tables were baked and hardened and so managed to survive the destruction.

[rustymonday]

There were several. Clay tablets from Ugarit, a Linear B tablet from Pylos, cuneiform tablets from Hattusa (in the decades before the city was abandoned), and several records from Egypt during the reigns of Merneptah and Ramesses III.

[cobbzilla]

Largely archaeological finds that yield tons of forensic evidence. Plus there are actually plenty of written records that have survived, albeit with major gaps. The Akkadians wrote on stone tablets, thousands of which have survived. Mostly they are banal transaction records (which still tell us a lot!) but there are many others, including some court records from ancient Egypt and elsewhere.

[adastra22]

More specifically, the Akkadian language with cuneiform on clay tablets became the lingua franca of the late Bronze Age, long after the decline of the Akkadian empire. The Bronze Age collapse dates to about a thousand years after the end of the Akkadian empire, but it was still the language used for diplomatic purposes as far away as the Aegean Sea and the Egyptian imperial court. A number of royal and scribe family archives have been found, containing thousands of these clay tablet letters.

[thaumasiotes]

> but it was still the language used for diplomatic purposes as far away as the Aegean Sea and the Egyptian imperial court.

And also the language in general use in southern Mesopotamia, presumably subject to historical changes.

Note that while the various states in that region didn't call themselves "the Akkadians", they did tend to claim the title by giving their king the very traditional royal honor "King of Sumer and Akkad". By the twelfth century BC, the title was attached to Babylon.

[jcranmer]

The main literary primary sources are monumental inscriptions in Egypt and a cache of diplomatic letters from some of the cities that were destroyed in the Bronze Age collapse.