The Sea Peoples invasion was repelled by Ramesses III in a decisive ambush at the mouth of the Nile, making Egypt the first civilization to turn back these invaders, but the victory left Egypt alone in a devastated region and its economy went into terminal decline.
The narrator describes how Ramesses III ambushed the Sea Peoples' fleet at the Nile delta with concealed archers and spearmen, achieving a victory that saved Egypt but could not prevent its long-term economic collapse in the aftermath of the Late Bronze Age collapse. ✦ AI generated
Ramesses III (inscription at Medinet Habu, quoted by Paul Cooper) · Fall of Civilizations · 2024-04-30 · original ↗
starts at this moment · 184:10
Those who reached my boundary, their heart and their soul are finished forever and ever. As for those who had assembled before them on the sea, the full flame was in their front, before the harbor-mouths, and a wall of metal upon the shore surrounded them. They were dragged, overturned, and laid low upon the beach; slain, and made heaps from stern to bow of their galleys, while all their things were cast upon the water.
verbatim transcript · starts at 184:10
183:54peoples that had first appeared in the reign of the pharaoh Merneptah, and who are known as the sea peoples. These invaders were now descending on the entire region in ever- greater numbers, apparently spurred by widespread crop failures in Northern and Western Europe. Already, powerful trading cities like the port town of Ugarit had been attacked by sea, seemingly by complete surprise, and they were destroyed so thoroughly that they were never reoccupied.
184:31The Egyptians great rivals, the Hittites, were now on the brink of collapse, as trade networks around the region went into freefall. Ramesses remembers this time of strife as these northern Invaders descended on the coast. The northerners in their isles were disturbed, swept away in battle. Not one stood before their lands; from Kheta, Carchemish, Arvad, Alasa, they were wasted. They set up a camp in one place in Amor. They desolated his people and his land like
185:13that which is not. When news of the sea people's attacks came to Ramesses, he would have been pharaoh for about eight years. He had already repelled two further invasions from Libya and must have been rising in confidence. But the news troubled him, and soon he got word that the fleet of the sea peoples was on the move and were heading to Egypt, as he recounts in the inscription on his mortuary temple at Medinet Habu.
185:52They came with fire prepared before them, forward to Egypt. Their main support was Peleset, Thekel, Shekelesh, Denyen, and Weshesh. Their lands were united, and they laid their hands upon the land as far as the Circle of the Earth. Their hearts were confident, full of their plans. Ramesses knew that these attackers would have to be stopped, and he decided that he would make his stand at the mouth of the Nile, the lush, fertile