Talk:Sea Peoples

ERA

Hi Donald Albury, the original non stub wiki for this article is BC and it was changed against MOS:ERA protocol to a CE article. I am simply reverting this change.

If, however, you think this should constitute a conversation about why this article needs to be changed to a CE article rather than a BC article please state your arguments here. Paokara777 (talk) 01:03, 14 October 2023 (UTC)

Note that BCE has been used in preference to BC in this article since 2013, ten years, which means that it had become the established style. MOS:ERA says, An article's established era style should not be changed without reasons specific to its content; seek consensus on the talk page first (applying Wikipedia:Manual of Style § Retaining existing styles) by opening a discussion under a heading using the word era, and briefly stating why the style should be changed. I do not see anything in Wikipedia:Manual of Style/Dates and numbers that priviledges the original style if another style has become the established style. That this article originally used BC rather than BCE would be an argument to present in a discussion about changing the article from BCE to BC, but it does not justify unilaterally making that change without consensus. Donald Albury 13:03, 14 October 2023 (UTC)

What is the maximum time, frame as per the manual of style, after which an incorrect edit is to remain in a wiki article? Paokara777 (talk) 22:56, 14 October 2023 (UTC)

No style of Era is correct or incorrect. The whole point of the MOS provision on ERA is that both BC/AD and BCE/CE are valid styles. The prohibition on changing established styles without a consensus to do so is to provide stability to articles, lest editors edit war over which style to use. If a particular style of Era has been used in an article for many years, as is the case here, without being challenged, it is established, and should not be changed without a consensus to do so being reached in a discussion. Per the advice at Wikipedia:BOLD, revert, discuss cycle, you would have done better by starting this discussion without reverting me. That you did revert me is the first step in an edit war. I will not revert you because I try very hard to voluntarily observe a one-revert rule to avoid any appearance of edit warring. Donald Albury 00:39, 15 October 2023 (UTC)

The article was already established as BC article in the 10 years previous to its uncited change to a BCE article. Users seem to only enforce when BCE articles are (correctly or incorrectly) changed from BCE to BC and seem to turn a blind eye the other way around. In any case, I would not be advocating for this to be a BC article if it wasn't established as one, the same way that i would support you or anyone else advocating for a BCE article to stay a BCE article as the MOS:ERA states. And I agree, to stop the revert wars we need to establish or draw a line in the sand somewhere. And the line was drawn. If it was established as a non stub article with BC and AD era notations it is to remain that way unless there is a good reason not to, and a consensus is reached on that. If we fail to uphold those rules we do, as you bring up, risk starting a revert war for bce and bc articles. Paokara777 (talk) 07:04, 15 October 2023 (UTC)

Well, when the question of what "established era styler" means was discussed at Wikipedia talk:Manual of Style/Archive 226#Discussion (MOS:ERA's "established era style" clause) early last year, there was no clear consensus, so I will leave this discussion, unless other editors weight in to establish a conensus for this article.

I will advise you to either produce evidence that Users seem to only enforce when BCE articles are (correctly or incorrectly) changed from BCE to BC and seem to turn a blind eye the other way around., or strike it out. I do use BCE/CE where I think it is appropriate in articles that I create (about archaeological sites and archaeological cultures of the Southeastern U.S.). I have never changed an article from one ERA style to another, except to revert changes made without consensus. I revert such changes without regard to which style was previuosly established in the article. As I said, if you do know of any editor that is reverting era changes in only one direction, say who it is so that the behavior can be addressed. Unsubstantiated charges of that sort are not helpful for building the community. Donald Albury 21:51, 15 October 2023 (UTC)

Just wanted to pop in briefly to make my usual arguments for BCE, though to be honest, they're basically my subjective views. In my anecdotal experience, the trend in the scholarly world (at least in North America) has been toward BCE, especially with regard to subjects having no link to Christianity. Couple that with my (again, subjective) horror at the fact that most everyone agrees that "BC" is based on the wrong date, and my mind is made up. That is, it is a problem for me to assert that the historical Jesus was alive for somewhere between two and four years "Before Christ," but not to say "Jesus was born two to four years before the "Common Era." While the latter still doesn't make a ton of sense, it has the virtue to me of not being inherently contradictory. That said, happy to go wherever consensus leads. Cheers. Dumuzid (talk) 01:11, 16 October 2023 (UTC)

Hi Dumuzid. Thanks for chiming in. The "scholarly world" also exists outside of N. America. Even in America there is not 100% consensus on what is more accurate and what should be used. Using BCE in place of BC is misleading. Yes, it might be (possibly, it hasn't been 100% made certain) that Christ was born a couple of years before the dating system would suggest. The dating system itself is a piece of history. The fact that you were "horrified" about a dating system also might hint towards your personal biases and preferences. Paokara777 (talk) 09:18, 16 October 2023 (UTC)

The evidence I can point to is in this very discussion. Would you consider the change from BC to BCE in 2013 to be unjustified as per MOS:ERA. And no one reverted it. I am also like you, Donald. I do not change BCE articles to BC. I am not looking for a culture war here, I am looking to enforce the MOS:ERA in a way that keeps the balance and neutrality alive in this community. I respect your opinions and your leaning towards BCE for your articles. I am not trying to change that. Paokara777 (talk) 09:13, 16 October 2023 (UTC)

I agree that a decade at BCE is more than long enough to have established it as the consensus standard at the article. Whether is should have been changed 10 years ago without more discussion is basically irrelevant at this point, and trying to change it back to BC against a decade of stability and consistency on the basis of someone not properly following some rule (in a guideline not a policy) ten years ago is WP:WIKILAWYERing (specifically both of a the first two bullet items listed there; the purpose of the guideline is to stop date-warring not to enable more of it) and runs counter to both WP:EDITCON and WP:NOT#BUREAUCRACY policies. Usage in reliable source materials on this subject is entirely mixed and there is no "national tie" argument to make, so there is no reader-facing reason and not legitimate editor-facing reason to move away from the now well-established BCE style. Meanwhile, this topic has no connection to Christianity (or Western history under Christianity, or anything otherwise related), so there is no rationale in favor of BC in particular.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  19:04, 19 November 2023 (UTC)

The originally established BC Article was incorrectly changed to a BCE article from an anonymous user Special:Contributions/89.16.134.159. That user did not explain why it should be changed from a BC article to a BCE article. If you think that the change from BC to BCE is justified but the change back to BC is not then you have a bias towards BCE which is what the MOS:ERA document was established to address. Paokara777 (talk) 12:58, 20 November 2023 (UTC)

I would also like to note that there is an image in this article "Sea Peoples#/media/File:Invasions, destructions and possible population movements during the Bronze Age Collapse, ca. 1200 BC.png" that has BC notation used in the image, and one section of Wikipedia:Manual of Style#Retaining existing styles states that there should be Consistency within articles. Since we are using BC notation in the image and caption of that image, it would be following with both the MOS:ERA and Manual of style guidelines. See: Use either the BC–AD or the BCE–CE notation consistently within the same article. Exception: do not change direct quotations, titles, etc Wikipedia:Manual of Style/Dates and numbers#Year numbering systems Paokara777 (talk) 13:22, 20 November 2023 (UTC)

A ten-year stable situation with era should not be overturned, and one of the reasons for that is to avoid fruitless discussions like this one from proliferating over numerous articles. I am one of those who will change BC to BCE and vice versa, most of the time I really don't care which it is.

That said, my personal feeling is that the further it is in the past, the less either of them make sense, and a shift to BP (before present) or "[years] ago" makes increasing sense, such as the arrival of humans in Australia about 50,000 years B.P. I don't know where the transition from BP to BC/BCE should be, but it just feels like anything older than about 10,000 years ago is so remote from anything relating to Jesus Christ that it just seems silly to me to use formulation, whether BC or BCE. I think it's reasonable for anything back to the United Monarchy (King David; 10th century BCE, which is the oldest generally recognized historical event in the Bible—some say Exodus, in 13th c. BCE, but it's controversial) and before that, it seems less and less sensible to use the terms. In a stretch, maybe as far back as six millenia ago, per Bishop Usher's calculation of 4,004 BC for Creation. Beyond that, what is the point? The last ice age or the Bering land bridge was 13,000 years before Christ, or the Common Era? Seems almost embarrassing, and makes as little sense. But this is just my personal opinion/rant, and as far as our guideline is concerned, whatever the stable current usage is, should be retained, and I'm happy to support that in either direction, with maybe a nudge towards B.P. for the more remote events. Mathglot (talk) 09:00, 16 June 2024 (UTC)

@Mathglot The issue with B.P is the underlying pessimism and relativity that arrives after thinking about it. The present is ever moving forward, so one would always have to know when an article was made and then last updated to then know when the events took place. We should probably act as if someone is reading Wikipedia 100 or 1000 years from now, no matter how unlikely it would seem to a person.

Since BCE is based on BC and is in fact the exact same thing, is there any reason as to not submit to two descriptive annotations, and the deciding factor would be the person who is writing the article in the first place? Once an article is created, the same article then follows that annotation. We have more than one word for many things, so it is not demanding to have one, the other, or both, set into an article.

Is there any reason to put weight on one or the other, except a disliking to how history has evidently unfolded, and the scholarship of the past? We cannot change who discovered or described or set what standards here, in the future. Many of our words, famously "Goodbye", inherently stem from our real past and have a direct link to our past with Christianity. Is there any practical purpose in attempting to wipe out this specific part of global history? Mainly everyone on the planet is on the same year, regardless of who invented the era or how it ended up there. We probably use endless words, descriptions, and systems that do not originate from our lands, culture, religious experiences, or ethnic groups, and which are based on long lost systems of thought. Our letters are Latin. Our English weekdays are based on Norse and Latin mythology. One should probably question why Friday is fine, if BC is not. If Jesus was born 50 years +- to BC, that is the linguistic description we have set centuries ago, and it describes the era we are in, and it also describes where the era came from. Thus I would argue that it does more to describe our era as well as describing where it came from. Maybe

a future era description will be more to one's liking, but again, this topic is getting more and more absurdist the farther one delves into it.

If the urge for change is emotional, then perhaps it is a personal issue that one has to deal with somewhere else than on a Wikipedia article. If someone doesn't like the phrase "Arabic" or "Indian" numerals, then I would imagine they would have to try to come to terms with the reality of our numeral system originating in India, or then begin a campaign to invent a new, more "pure" numeral system, which again sounds quite absurd.

There is nothing inherently wrong with BC and AD. We use it to describe the era. If someone wants to know what the letters mean and where it comes from, the description itself holds the answer. It's an accurate description of time and how it came to be, and the story of it going global is quite a story in of itself. I see this argument the same way as I would see someone wanting to have their timezone be set as the official 0, because they don't like the British, or they don't like the person who came up with the system, or they don't like the color of their skin, or that someone else was first and the rest of us were last. Sometimes one's wants can be irrelevant, and many times they should be treated as such after careful consideration. LauHir (talk) 15:23, 11 August 2024 (UTC)

There nothing more relative about Before Present than there is with any other era designator, as "before present" is defined as "before 1950". For dates that are millennia in the past, "BP" is functionally equivalent to "years ago". Millennia-old dates are usually imprecise enough that saying that something occurred 10,000 BP is close enough to saying something occurred 10,000 years ago for most purposes. It is unlikely that the number in such a statement will become noticeably out-of-date in the next century or two. There can be confusion, however, in comparing BP to BC/BCE, as 10,000 BP or "years ago" is equivalent to 8,000 BC/BCE. I have seen mistakes over that conversion in WP articles. Where the sources use BP, we should use it, to most faithfully represent the sources. Donald Albury 19:58, 11 August 2024 (UTC)

Confusion about opening and later sections of the article

I'm concerned about some potential internal contradictions. The lead seems to suggest that the hypothesis of the "Sea Peoples" being migrants from others parts of the Mediterranean is largely discredited in academia, and one source specifically states that them being from "islands" is probably a misreading, and they were likely from southern Anatolia or Syria instead. However, later in the article the theory that the Sherden are from Sardinia and migrated to the eastern Mediterranean is prominently mentioned. Reading the page on the Sherden sure does seem to indicate that them being from Sardinia is still an acceptable theory that is supported by prominent archeologists. So I'm wondering, what exactly is the lead saying? Is Maspero's incorrect assertion that ALL these groups were "sea peoples" from Mediterranean islands what's fully discredited, or is the idea that any of them came from Mediterranean islands at all discredited? Because in the case of the latter, that seems to be very much debated based on sources in this and the Sherden article. Or am I misreading [1] and the current scholarly consensus is that some of the Sea Peoples came from other parts of the Mediterranean, settled, and then invaded Egypt from Anatolia, which contradicts Maspero's claim that it was their "migration" that caused the collapse? Wertwert55 (talk) 06:36, 16 June 2024 (UTC)

Hedging in the lede

My understanding of the literature is that there is no doubt that these groups existed and were individually bothersome to several pharaohs, but that there is significant doubt that they ever formed a coalition that attacked Egypt itself. This is outside my area of expertise so I might be overlooking important nuances, but recent sources such as Redford (2018) certainly give the impression of an ongoing debate. So unless I'm missing something important ––which, again, I might be!–– I think it would be misleading to outright assert that the Sea Peoples attacked Egypt.

That said, I'm not totally happy with the current phrasing either. What's tricky here is that any concise definition would have to combine a bunch of claims, each of which is its own rabbit hole. So maybe one solution would be to start with a minimalist definition ("The Sea Peoples were a collection of ethnic groups mentioned in LBA inscriptions") and then split the key information across subsequent sentences. Just a thought. Botterweg14 (talk) 20:05, 5 August 2024 (UTC)