In Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey (2026), several characters reference a mysterious group, called the “people from the sea,” who have been attacking established settlements and palaces. Penelope, wife of Greek hero Odysseus, describes her fear that the people from the sea will raid Ithaca, which is vulnerable without the leadership of its king. The characters worry that these attacks will lead to the fall of their entire civilization. At the end of the film Odysseus tells Penelope that in fact he and his fellow Greeks are the people from the sea. It is they who have been sailing widely in search of food and supplies, often killing people and leaving destruction in their wake.
This storyline alludes to a real-life historical mystery, that of the Sea People, groups of seafarers who arrived in eastern Anatolia, Syria, Palestine, Cyprus, and Egypt toward the end of the Bronze Age, especially in the 13th century bce. Historical accounts of the Sea People’s raiding—most notably several Egyptian texts dating to the 13th and 12th centuries bce—coincide with what is known as the Late Bronze Age collapse, a period when trade connections declined and many large settlements were destroyed or abandoned. Indeed, some of this destruction occurred in Mycenaean Greece. For example, the palace at Mycenae, which appears in Homer’s Odyssey as the seat of King Agamemnon, was burned about 1100 bce. Scholars continue to debate who exactly the Sea People were and their possible role in the Late Bronze Age collapse.