The Greeks turned to piracy after the Trojan War

Marauding Greek pirates caused the destruction of the Hittite empire and the attacks on Egypt and parts of Greece. According to some scholars, Homer’s Odyssey is set during the period of the Bronze Age Collapse. Some of the stories Odysseus tells about his travels home include piratical raiding all over the Aegean. When Odysseus disguises himself as a Cretan man, he recounts the story of a failed attack on Egypt, after which he was locked into service to Egypt for seven years. This may well be the same attack mentioned in the Egyptian sources, which caused some Sea People to settle in Egypt. ^[1] The Greek Geographer Strabo also claims that the Greeks were raiders. He claimes that the Greeks who sacked Troy had been away for so long that they had lost most of their own homeland and turned to piracy. On their return home from Troy, they may have caused a Greek civil war which would explain the collapse of Mycenaean Greece in this period.^[2] During Homeric times, the Greeks had a variety of names for themselves, some of which may be referenced in the Egyptian sources. Egyptian sources refer to some of the Sea People as the “Denyen”, probably a transliteration of the Greek word “Danaan” used by Homer. Similarly, the word ‘Eqwesh’ in Egyptian could be the Greek word ‘Archaean’.^[3] The Egyptian narrative fits with what we know about piracy in this period from Greek sources. The Sea People are likely to have been mostly Greek and may have been from Crete in particular.

[P1] The Odyssey makes reference to Greek piracy at this time in the aftermath of the Trojan War. [P2] Some Egyptian references to the ethnicity of Sea people have a shared etymology to archaic words for Greek-speaking people. [C] Turmoil in the Greek-speaking world following the Trojan war led to widespread piracy and societal collapse.