A Pirate's Life for me: The Maritime Culture of the Sea Peoples

Abstract

An anthropological approach to a culture extrapolates social structures, traditions, and general organizing principles of that culture from the careful observation of patterns of behaviour as described in case studies. In the absence of a living culture to record, archaeologists extrapolate this information from behaviour reconstructed from spatially determined patterns in the deposition of material remains and from patterns found in the general organizing principles of historically documented cultures, using arguments based on analogy. This contribution builds on our previous research on the “Sea Peoples” as a piratical culture in order to apply an anthropological approach to understanding the cultural identities of the various tribal groups involved in maritime activities at the end of the Bronze Age who are popularly known as the “Sea Peoples”, and place this within the broader context of the current discussions on the transition between the Late Bronze and Early Iron Age in the Mediterranean.

Keywords:

• Piracy
• Sea Peoples
• Aegean
• Philistines
• Anthropology
• Mediterranean

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

The authors wish to thank Richard Pennell for pointing us in a helpful and productive direction in pirate studies and Brent Davis for assisting with formatting. LAH's research was funded by the SSP-Long Scheme of the Faculty of Arts at the University of Melbourne. AMM's research was partially funded by a grant from the Israel Science Foundation (#100/13).

ORCiD

Louise A. Hitchcock http://orcid.org/0000-0002-2811-4224

Aren M. Maeir http://orcid.org/0000-0003-3230-292X

Notes

1 The Southeast Aegean/Southwest Anatolian Region: Material Evidence and Cultural Identity I: The Early and Middle Bronze Age, conference held in May 2016.

2 Each of these articles has a different focus on the Sea Peoples from the present one. The first examines the relationship between piracy and migration, the second provides an overview of pirate leadership and feasting habits, the third one only touches on the topic of piracy with regard to ways of studying east-west interactions, and the fourth investigates the relationship between an Aegean thalassocracy, piracy and Cretan geography from the Late Bronze Age until the end of the Bronze Age.

3 This seemed to be the preferred form of ship used by the Sea Peoples if representations are to be believed. On the details of their construction see Wachsmann (2008: 155–58).

4 Comment by R. Jung at Hesperos conference, held in Thessaloniki, Greece, 18–20 June 2016.