Tjeker

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The Tjekker were one of the Sea Peoples who raided Egypt and the Levant during the 13th and 12th centuries BCE. Sea-marauders who lived aboard their ships, according to testimony at Ugarit^[1], they raided Egypt repeatedly before settling in northern Canaan. Rameses III in a stele claimed to have "annihilated" the Tjeker, the Danuna/Denyen and the Philistines^[2]

Contents 1 Origin 2 Mythology 3 Settlement at Dor 4 Notes 5 References 6 See also

[edit] Origin

The Tjeker were of uncertain origin; a possible linguistic connection has suggested the Teucri^[3], a tribe described by Homer and other ancient sources as inhabiting northwest Anatolia to the south of Troy.^[4] One of those sources, the geographer, Strabo,^[5] says that the Teukroi (Τεύκροι) came from Crete, in search of a new home. They had received an oracle to "stay on the spot where the earth-born should attack them." They were encamped at the site of the future village of Chryse, later incorporated into Hamaxa, then Alexandria Troas, when an attack of mice devoured the leather in their equipage, so they settled the region and renamed the mountain they saw in the distance, at whose foothills they were, to Mount Ida after Mount Ida, Crete.

The location of Chryse is not known for sure, but that of Hamaxa is marked by the ancient salt works there, which exploited the outcroppings of rock salt. They are all located in Ayvacık, Çanakkale province of Turkey, at the tip of the Biga Peninsula (the Troad). According to Strabo^[5] the Teucrians built a temple to Apollo Smintheus^[6] at Chryse. The classical name for the temple was the Smintheum, containing the pre-Greek word Smin-, presumably "mouse." This name may indicate a Minoan provenience, or more likely a general pre-Greek one, as other Pelasgians, the Leleges, settled nearby. There are quite a few Sminthea throughout the Aegean world. Or, the word may simply have been used by wandering Mycenaean Greeks from Crete.

The temple was moved in classical times. Currently a temple exists to Apollo Smintheus at the village of Gülpinar, dating to about 330 BCE.^[7] The Teucri must have preceded the Trojan War, as they fought in it on the Trojan side, and therefore date to the Bronze Age.

[edit] Mythology

Main article: King Teucer

[edit] Settlement at Dor

The Tjeker conquered the city-state of Dor, on the coast of Canaan near modern Haifa, and turned it into a large, well-fortified city, (Dor XII, c. 1150-1050), the center of a Tjeker kingdom that is confirmed archaeologically in the northern Sharon plain; it was violently destroyed in the mid-eleventh century BCE, firing the mud bricks red and depositing a huge layer of ash and debris. Ephraim Stern^[8] connects the destruction with the contemporary expansion of the Phoenicians, which was checked by the Philistines further south and the United Monarchy. No mention of the Tjeker is made after that time, the period of archaeoligical and literary silence. The Tjeker are one of the few of the Sea Peoples for whom a ruler's name is recorded - in the eleventh-century papyrus account of Wenamun, an Egyptian priest, the ruler of Dor is given as "Beder".

After two intermediate occupations, the earlier of which has yielded imported Cypriote ceramics as well as Phoenician wares (Dor XI-X) and is followed by a well-stratified and important Phoenician presence (Dor IX), in the early 900s the site of Dor fell to the Israelites under David.

[edit] Notes

[edit] References

• E. Stern, "New Evidence from Dor for the First Appearance of the Phoenicians along the Northern Coast of Israel" Bulletin of the American Schools of Oriental Research No. 279 (August 1990), pp. 27-34.
• N. K. Sandars, The Sea Peoples: Warriors of the ancient Mediterranean, Revised Edition, Thames and Hudson, Copyright 1985, ISBN 0-500-27387-1

[edit] See also

• Troy