Sherden and Peleset: the Pharaoh’s Mercenaries (EVA0259)

Sherden and Peleset: yesterday’s raiders, today’s guardsmen

Two men on the left wear horned helmets with a disc between the horns; the men in the centre and on the right wear tall crowns of stiff feathers. On the ground lie the Libyans, and you can tell them too — tattoos on the arms and legs, a feather in the hair, long cloaks. Everyone in this picture is identifiable at a glance, and that is not the painter showing off. It is how Egypt catalogued the world.

These are the same people who attacked Egypt

The horned helmets are Sherden; the feathered crowns are Peleset. Both appear in Egyptian records first as enemies — raiders on the coast, then part of the coalition beaten in the Delta — and afterwards as troops of the pharaoh. The losers of one generation are the guard of the next, which was not cynicism but standard practice: a defeated warrior is an experienced warrior who now needs an employer.

What a mercenary was actually paid in

Not coin — there was none. Prisoners and hired men were settled: given land, rations and a place in a garrison, in Egypt or in the territories it controlled. That is why the arrangement stuck. The Peleset settled on the Canaanite coast, and their name is the root of the word Palestine. A military expedient turned into a map.

The straight sword is a technology, not a style

The long straight blades carried by these men belong to a type that spread through the eastern Mediterranean in exactly this period, alongside the movements of the people who used it. Weapons travel with the men who own them, and a sword design is one of the few things an archaeologist can follow across a sea.

How the Libyans are drawn tells you who is drawing

Tattoos, side-locks, feathers, patterned cloaks: an ethnography compiled by the people who were fighting them. It is precise and it is also a claim — the enemy is shown as legible, orderly and defeated, which is what a temple wall is for. Everything we recognise in this painting comes from those reliefs, including the helmets.

Egypt outlived the crisis; the empires around it did not

The Bronze Age collapse ended the Hittite state, Ugarit and Mycenaean Greece. Egypt was hit — it shrank, it lost its Asian holdings, and within a century the pharaoh’s writ ran only in part of his own country — but it did not vanish. Absorbing the newcomers instead of only fighting them is part of the reason. The empire that did not manage it is in EVA0255.