At the end of the Bronze Age, the political world of the eastern Mediterranean fractured. Mycenaean palaces burned, the Hittite imperial centre disappeared, Ugarit's archives ended and long-distance exchange faltered. On the walls of Medinet Habu, Ramesses III claimed that Egypt defeated enemies advancing by land and sea. Modern historians know several of those groups collectively as the Sea Peoples.

The Sea Peoples investigates the evidence behind that powerful name. It follows Sherden in Egyptian service, the Libyan coalition defeated by Merneptah, the naval and land battles commemorated by Ramesses III, and the disputed histories of Peleset, Tjekker, Denyen, Weshesh, Shekelesh and others. It also examines Mycenaean tablets, Ugaritic letters, Hittite collapse, Cypriot trade, drought evidence, destruction layers and migration into the southern Levant.

Richly illustrated with rights-verified historical sources, this book rejects the myth of one mysterious horde that destroyed civilisation in a single year. Instead, it reveals a regional crisis in which warfare, movement, food stress, political fracture and disrupted networks reinforced one another—and a post-palatial world in which communities survived, mixed and built new states.