The Odyssey is haunted by the mysterious ‘Sea Peoples’ – but who were they, really?

Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey is haunted by the Sea Peoples, spectral men on the edges of a civilisation teetering on the brink. This anxiety isn’t just cinematic fiction. The Sea Peoples feature in writing from 1200 BCE, blamed for the collapse of the interconnected world of the Bronze Age (which lasted from roughly 1500 to 1180 BCE). That world collapsed under many crises, seemingly all at once. In Greece, the grand palaces of Mycenae and Pylos – home to the legendary kings of Homer’s…