Archaeology Magazine: "The Philistine Age"

Sherden and Tjeker on Pylon of Medinet Habu (Wikipedia)

    Ilan Ben Zion has published an article in Archaeology Magazine on the topic of "The Philistine Age." Most of us are only familiar with the Philistines in their role as the arch enemy of the Israelites during the later period of the reign of the judges and during the period of the united Kingdom of Israel under Saul, David and Solomon. As Ben Zion observes: "The Bible’s pejorative depiction of the Philistines has so pervaded Western culture that, more than 3,000 years on, 'philistine' remains a byword for an unsophisticated person indifferent or hostile to artistic and intellectual pursuits."

    Up until recently, the pervasive belief among archeologists was that the Philistines originated in the Aegean, were probably the "Sea Peoples" (or a major constituent thereof) that overthrew and destroyed the kingdoms and empires causing the Bronze Age Collapse, and forcefully invaded Israel and Canaan and settled there. Ben Zion argues that more recent and more extensive archeological digs of four of the main five Philistine cities paints a more nuanced picture. 

Maeir and many of his colleagues suggest that the Philistines were an eclectic and multiethnic group of migrants, not a uniform horde of invaders. He believes it’s likely they hailed from various locations around the eastern Mediterranean and moved to the Levant over many decades between the late thirteenth and mid-twelfth centuries B.C. They settled, mostly peaceably, among the local Canaanites, creating a distinct hybrid culture that endured for much of the Iron Age. “What we’ve learned about Philistine culture at Gath,” Maeir says, “is that the process of its origins, formation, transformation, and development is much more complex than was originally thought.” 

The article continues:

Like the Israelites living in the inland hill country to the east of Gath, the Philistines first appear in the historical record during the upheaval of the end of the Late Bronze Age, around 1200 B.C., when a period of stability in the eastern Mediterranean marked by long-distance trade and diplomacy came to a dramatic end. The Hittite Empire that had ruled Anatolia since about 1750 B.C. collapsed. The Egyptian grip over Canaan began a long decline, after which some Canaanite cities were destroyed. Scholars debate what precipitated this Late Bronze Age collapse. Maeir says there likely wasn’t a single root cause, but that a combination of environmental and social factors were to blame. Analysis of pollen and sediments from Bronze Age sites in Greece and Israel shows that the eastern Mediterranean experienced a period of severe aridity starting around 1250 B.C. Protracted periods of drought and famine likely fanned social unrest and may have triggered mass migrations and invasions that undermined the political stability of the Late Bronze Age. 

Ben Zion then goes into more detail about Maeir's findings and his belief that the Philistines actually represented a vibrant cosmopolitan and migrant culture. That doesn't mean that Maeir's views are fully accepted.

    Maeir’s vision of the Philistines isn’t the only one embraced by modern archaeologists. Wheaton College archaeologist Daniel Master, who codirected recent excavations at Ashkelon, the Philistine port 18 miles west of Tell es-Safi, believes Egyptian and biblical accounts should be interpreted more literally. He thinks that the Philistines likely hailed from Crete and conquered Canaanite cities during a brief window around 1175 B.C Philistine pottery resembling ceramics from Mycenaean sites was a product of a single stylistic moment, Master says. Those pottery types and decorative styles, he thinks, changed in parallel in Philistia and the Aegean during a single generation. 

    The 2013 discovery of a cemetery at Ashkelon, the first large burial ground to be excavated at one of the cities of the Philistine Pentapolis, has helped bolster Master’s view. This cemetery contained some 200 burials dating to the Philistine period in which individuals were interred separately. This is unlike Canaanite funerary practices in which the dead were cremated or buried collectively in pits or tombs. Genetic analysis of these remains, says Master, supports Egyptian accounts of the Philistines’ origins. He was part of a team that analyzed the DNA of 10 individuals found in the Ashkelon cemetery: three dating from the Bronze Age, four from the Early Iron Age, and three dating to the tenth to ninth century B.C. The team found that DNA sampled from the Early Iron Age burials had a European genetic component that set the people apart from the local Bronze Age Canaanite population and supports the idea that the Philistines originated in Crete. 

But other researchers warn that the sample size for the DNA study are too small to be taken as definitive, and while there is a strong Greek thread in the styles of pottery and other objects, there are also elements of Levantine styles intermixed, and some Canaanite practices apparently continued into the Philistine period.

    Hitchcock says the archaeological record doesn’t neatly match the traditional scholarly accounts of Philistine invasion and colonization. In particular, she points to the absence of evidence of violent conquest at Philistine sites, including Gath. “We go straight from early Philistine layers down into Late Bronze Age layers with no evidence of destruction,” she says. “This calls into question the whole myth of the Philistines as an invading force of Mycenaean colonizers sweeping in and taking over.” In addition, very few weapons have been found at Philistine sites, an absence that challenges the martial image of the Philistines presented in the Bible. 

    Maeir and Hitchcock propose that the people who became the Philistines were part of migrating populations who formed opportunistic pirate tribes. These groups may have roamed the Mediterranean, taking on followers from a number of different disrupted societies. “When Egypt loosened its grip on Philistia, these groups finally settled in among the local population,” Hitchcock says. The scholars believe that some of the peoples who comprised the Philistines were multiethnic groups of raiders possibly analogous to Atlantic pirates of the seventeenth century A.D., who are known to have come from many different nations.

    The truth of the matter is probably somewhere in the middle. Egyptian paintings of the Sea Peoples show a rather polyglot group of invaders, and the two pharaohs that recorded battles with them listed a total of 9 groups:  Shardana, Shekelesh, Lukka, Teresh, Ekwesh, Tjekker, Denyen, Weshesh, and Peleset. The Peleset are believed to have been the Philistines. The popular theories of the Sea Peoples suggest that they originated from several groups migrating into the Mediterranean and seemingly arriving at a time that the local populaces were unhappy with their rulers, with the result that there seemed to have been widespread war and uprisings through the area.

    As for where they came from, the early Egyptologists were split in their opinion as to whether the Sea Peoples had come from the west, i.e., Italy, Sicily, and Sardinia, and traveled east, or whether they were from the Eastern Mediterranean and had fled west after being defeated by the Egyptians. Even today we still play linguistic games with the names of the individual groups whom the Egyptian pharaohs mentioned. Most (although not all) scholars would now argue that the Sea Peoples began their migration from the Western Mediterranean, and that there is a linguistic link between the Shardana and Sardinia as well as the Shekelesh and Sicily. However, when they headed east and overran various countries and areas, others joined in along the way, so that the Denyen and Ekwesh might be from the Aegean (Homer’s Danaans and Achaeans), the Lukka are almost certainly from Lycia in southwestern Turkey, and so on.

    If that thinking is correct, then the two waves of Sea Peoples that crashed upon the shores of Egypt thirty years apart were composed of a motley crew from many different areas of both the western and eastern Mediterranean plus the Aegean and perhaps Cyprus as well. But all of that, plain and simple, is still just a hypothesis, for there are no other texts or even archaeological evidence at the moment to confirm the entire story. 

    What we have instead are bits and pieces of the puzzle, such as the fact that the Shardana (also called the Sherden) appear in Egyptian texts and inscriptions already a century or more earlier, fighting as mercenaries both for and against the Egyptian army. Individual texts from places such as Ugarit in north Syria report unnamed invaders and foreign ships, as well as famine in the Hittite lands. We also have sites destroyed during this time, but it’s not always clear who or what did it and why – perhaps foreign invaders; perhaps an uprising by the local populace; perhaps an earthquake. It can be difficult, and sometimes impossible, to tell what caused the destruction of a site, especially if no weapons (such as arrowheads, swords, or spear tips) or bodies are found in the rubble.

It is possible that Canaan was rapidly overwhelmed with migrants (i.e., an invasion) but that the local rulers either capitulated without a fight or realized that hosting bands of pirates might enrich their pockets (i.e., no evidence of a violent invasion). Or, as Ramses' inscriptions suggest, perhaps the Philistine colonization of Canaan was part of an Egyptian resettlement program after he defeated the Sea Peoples in 1177 BC.