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Luke

@dukeluke.bsky.social

Gracchi supporter and Sertorian partisan Political Theory PhD student @ somewhere

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Luke@dukeluke.bsky.social · last wk.

Overall, I find Wilson's damning review to be excessive in many places. I am especially struck by the part where she says the Sea Peoples is a debunked theory and never existed. My understanding is that the Sea Peoples were more a symptom than cause of the Bronze Age Collapse, but she goes farther.

From Emily Wilson's review of Nolan's The Odyssey for LRB: "Nolan’s other major addition to Homer’s narrative is the repeated reference to threats to ‘our civilisation’ from ‘the sea peoples’ – a now debunked 19th-century theory about maritime tribes who were thought to have attacked Egypt around 1200 BCE and to have also been responsible for the roughly coeval collapse of Mycenaean Greek culture. ‘Our civilisation is under attack,’ Penelope wails. Odysseus comforts her by saying that ‘Bronze Age civilisation’, including literacy, will rise again from the ashes. The current consensus, as Nolan clearly knows, is that there was no such thing as ‘the sea peoples’, and that the Greek-speaking world’s shift away from the more centralised, literate palace culture of the Mycenaeans in the 11th century BCE towards the fragmented social formations of the early Greek Iron Age was caused by a range of factors, including climate change, earthquakes and internal unrest."