Thus in 1000 B.C., we look round the East, and, so far as our vision can penetrate the clouds, see no one dominant power. Territories which formerly were overridden by the greater states, Babylonia, Egypt, Cappadocia and Assyria, seem to be not only self-governing but free from interference, although the vanished empires and a recent great movement of peoples have left them with altered political boundaries and sometimes with new dynasties. None of the political units has a much larger area than another, and it would not have been easy at the moment to prophesy which, or if any one, would grow at the expense of the rest.
The great movement of peoples, to which allusion has just been made, had been disturbing West Asia for two centuries. On the east, where the well organized and well armed societies of Babylonia and Assyria offered a serious obstacle to nomadic immigrants, the inflow had been pent back beyond frontier mountains. But in the west the tide seems to have flowed too strongly to be resisted by such force as the Hatti empire of Cappadocia could oppose, and to have swept through Asia Minor even to Syria and Mesopotamia. Records of Rameses III tell how a great host of federated peoples appeared on the Asian frontier of Egypt very early in the twelfth century. Among them marched men of the "Kheta" or Hatti, but not as leaders. These strong foes and allies of Seti I and Rameses II, not a century before, had now fallen from their imperial estate to follow in the wake of newcomers, who had lately humbled them in their Cappadocian home. The geographical order in which the scribes of Rameses enumerated their conquests shows clearly the direction from which the federals had come and the path they followed. In succession they had devastated Hatti (i.e. Cappadocia), Kedi (i.e. Cilicia), Carchemish and central Syria. Their victorious progress began, therefore, in northern Asia Minor, and followed the great roads through the Cilician passes to end at last on the very frontiers of Egypt. The list of these newcomers has long interested historians; for outlandish as their names were to Egyptians, they seem to our eyes not unfamiliar, and are possibly travesties of some which are writ large on pages of later history. Such are the Pulesti or Philistines, and a group hailing apparently from Asia Minor and the Isles, Tjakaray, Shakalsha, Danaau and Washasha, successors of Pisidian and other Anatolian allies of the Hittites in the time of Rameses II, and of the Lycian, Achaean and Sardinian pirates whom Egypt used sometimes to beat from her borders, sometimes to enlist in her service. Some of these peoples, from whatever quarters they had come, settled presently into new homes as the tide receded. The Pulesti, if they were indeed the historic Philistines, stranded and stayed on the confines of Egypt, retaining certain memories of an earlier state, which had been theirs in some Minoan land. Since the Tjakaray and the Washasha seem to have sprung from lands now reckoned in Europe, we may count this occasion the first in history on which the west broke in force into the east.