• kromem@lemmy.world
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    2 months ago

    Ever noticed how right before they get referred to as the sea peoples, a bunch of the Anatolian tribes get captured in 12 groups at the end of the battle of Kadesh to be brought into Egyptian captivity?

    And that in their first mention of them as sea peoples, Egypt is remarking that they have no foreskins (as opposed to the partial/dorsal circumcision popular in Egypt at the time)?

    Where did Ramses III allegedly forcibly relocate them? Southern Levant?

    Isn’t that where there’s a later cultural history with one of the earliest dated sections being a song about how one of their tribes “stayed on their ships”? That’s even the same tribe that is later on referred to as trading with Tyre in goods native to the Adana area of Anatolia along with the Greeks right next to them.

    Also the same group where in the early Iron Age layer of the city named after them, Tel Dan, there’s Aegean style pottery made with local clay.

    This local cultural tradition makes frequent reference to a “land of milk and honey” even though there’s only ever been one apiary found in the region, which was importing Anatolian bees for its hives, is one of the earliest places a four horned altar is found (a feature of later Israelite shrines), and was regularly requeening their hives (I wonder if they knew it was a female and if that had anything to do with why the alleged author of the aforementioned song, who was their leader and prophet, was a woman named ‘bee’).

    Of course, the apiary gets destroyed around the time that cultural history claimed a guy deposed his grandmother, the Queen Mother and took power, instituting the first of a series of later patriarchal reforms.

    Gee, I wonder if maybe there was something to all that, and if it maybe left a mark in other ways.