Who were the Sea Peoples? The real history behind Nolan’s The Odyssey, and Cyprus’s place in it

In Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey, the Sea Peoples appear as ghostly figures circling a world already coming apart. That fear is far older than the film, according to Joshua David McDermott, a postdoctoral researcher in Classics and Ancient History at the University of Sydney.

Ancient writers around 1200 BCE were already pointing to the same group when they tried to explain why the tightly connected Bronze Age world, a network of kingdoms and trade routes stretching from roughly 1500 to 1180...