The Ethnicity of the Sea Peoples / De etniciteit van de zeevolken

"Bringing down the Hittite empire and dealing Egypt a blow from which it never recovered, the Sea Peoples’ episode at the end of the Bronze Age was crucial for a shift of the economic and political centre of gravity of the Mediterranean world away from the Levant and towards Greece, Africa Minor, and Italy. Soon this shift was to give rise to the splendors of archaic and classical Greece developing into Hellenism, Carthage, Etruscan civilization, Rome, the Roman empire, early Christianity, and, in the long run, the emergence the modern western European civilization, dominated by speakers of Indo-European languages, but greatly influenced by a Levantine religion (Judaism). For better or worse, the Sea Peoples’ episode was one of the few major turning points in world history, comparable to the period of the great migrations which led to the collapse of the Roman empire, or the rise and early spread of Islam."