In a series of articles, my colleague Aren Maeir and I sought to develop an explanation of what it meant to be a pirate in the Late Bronze Age. We did this by constructing an anthropological model of what a culture of piracy might consist of through examination of our sources from the classical era through to the eighteenth century (AD!) to see which features remained constant through time, while excluding features that were culturally and temporally specific. The model we developed was also constrained by the evidence: fragmentary textual accounts or references (pirates tended not to write their own histories), weapons, depictions of their panoply and ships, Mediterranean geography, feasting remains, and what we know of the consumption habits of the era.
Textual references
Our earliest textual information that suggests piratical activity comes from Hittite accounts, which mention a captive escaping the Shekelesh (Sicels?), while other texts mention ongoing raids by individuals from Ahhiyawa (Achaean or Mycenaean Greece) and MiIIawanda (Miletus), a Mycenaean colony. Inscriptions from Egypt, most famously from Medinet Habu, where the Sea People are also depicted in reliefs in the temple of Rameses III, provide us with the tribal names of the Sea People, mention that some of them served as mercenary soldiers in the Egyptian army, and claim success in repulsing various tribes of them. This fits what we know about later piracy
