An examination of the Sea Peoples would be remiss if it did not also acknowledge another popular theory: that these people were from the lost city of Atlantis,

relationship or partnership of some nature between the Sea Peoples and the Phoenicians is clearly in evidence.

Sea Peoples who took action. In 1208 BC they sailed to Egypt in small numbers, estimated at 5000 warriors,[xxvii] and attacked the successor to Ramses: king Merneptah. To do this they joined with the Egyptians’ western neighbors, the Libyans, and mounted an attack on the Nile Delta. Merneptah routed those forces, as described on his victory stele at Thebes.[xxviii]

a) the city of Ugarit which was totally destroyed and never rebuilt, b) the Hittite empire which was destroyed and left only a residual fragment on the Euphrates River, c) the Mycenaeans who were fatally wounded and would disappear completely within a hundred years, and d) Egypt which had won the battles but lost the Levant—it would waste away and become a shadow of its former self.

a) the tribes of people who came from Anatolia—and the lands to its north and west—who migrated into the Levant and onto islands across the Mediterranean, b) the Kaska who kept their original lands in the north of Anatolia on the Black Sea, and added the heart of the Hittite territories to their own, c) the West Anatolian people who remained in their own lands, but added some of the Hittite lands, and gained influence in the Aegean, and d) the Phoenicians who seem to have gained more than anyone else from the mass migration of the Land and Sea Peoples.

The legacy of the Sea Peoples was that they had forcefully cleared away the old powers from the Mediterranean and left freshly plowed ground. In time the Greeks and Romans would rise and they—together with the often overlooked Phoenicians—would sow the seeds of Western civilization.