Author: sumskilz
Original Thread: The Origin of the Philistines & The Sea Peoples Hypothesis


I'm recycling a bit from my old posts, but this subject is due for an update.


The Sea Peoples Hypothesis:


There is a narrative regarding the “Sea Peoples” that you're all no doubt familiar with. Oda recently mentioned the flimsy Sherden/Sardinia connection. The evidence being that since some “Sea Peoples” are depicted as having horned helmets and there are bronze sculptures from Sardinia of warriors who have horned helmets, the Sherden must be from Sardinia because the two words have similar consonants. Although those bronze sculptures aren't well dated, and are most likely from centuries later.


Another example of how tenuous all this is. The Shekelesh are never mentioned as being from the sea. The way Shelekesh is spelled (transliterated) in the few Egyptian inscriptions it occurs is šꜣkrš. So where did the L come from when it's clearly R? Well, sometimes that shift happens in Egyptian, but there is no reason to assume it other than to make the grand hypothesis work. There is a letter from Ugarit that refers to "people of the land of šikalayū" who are living on ships, thus the šꜣkrš must be from the land of šikalayū and now we have them living on ships. It's the Medinet Habu text that originally prompted the hypothesis, but there you have a different spelling of Shelekesh, there it's just š... That's right, it's not really there, the text is damaged. So why assume it's Shelekesh and not Shasu or something? Well, because the Shelekesh are mentioned with a few of those other names elsewhere, and also that's what it needs to be in order to make the hypothesis work. Are there any other people names that begin with š that are mentioned with those others elsewhere? That's probably too much to ask when we already think we have the answer. Anyway, all those proposed connections are plausible, even reasonable, but are still a stack of assumptions. Moving on...


How about the Ekwesh? We know they're said to be "from the countries of the sea", but also said to be circumcised, so hmm... and so forth...


Then there are the destructions. Hazor looks like an inside job. At least that's one way to plausibly reconstruct the evidence. There was a period of decline, over which people looked like they were fortifying their homes inside the city, filling in windows, etc. Not like an acute event, like things turned bad and got worse, and people had to start defending their homes from their neighbors. In the lower city that is. Things weren't too bad on the acropolis, in the big temple/palace. That is until people from the lower city broke in, beheaded the deity, and burned the place down. Then it was a poor ruin where a significantly decreased population just scraped out a living for awhile.


For certain, there were ethnic groups causing problems for the major powers during the Bronze Age Collapse, certainly this involved some migration, but the “Sea Peoples” term is a modern invention and a speculative phenomenon. That being said, one of the ethnic groups mentioned, we do know a bit about...


The Philistine Material Culture:


Until recently, the most important evidence potentially connecting the Philistines to the Aegean is the Mycenaean IIIC:1 pottery. It first appears in coastal Cilicia, Syria, and Philistia in the Twelfth Century. Arguably, not before 1125 in Philistia. It was being manufactured locally in Philistia and Cyprus. Otherwise, most of the Philistine material culture shows continuity with pre-existing Canaanite traditions. Philistia is defined archaeologically as the coastal region from Wadi Gaza in the south to the Yarkon River (Tel Aviv) in the north. It encompasses the five major urban centers Gaza, Ashkelon, Ashdod, Ekron, and Gath, portrayed in the Hebrew Bible as independent city-states ruled by the five “lords of the Philistines”.


Mycenaean IIIC:1 was also locally manufactured in Cyprus. Most likely earlier than in Philistia. North of Philistia at Akko (Acre), there was a somewhat different form of Mycenaean IIIC:1 pottery being manufactured. Other Mycenaean IIIC:1 finds along the coast of modern Syria and Lebanon were also likely locally manufactured, but most of these finds are not yet published, and in these cases the assumption of local manufacture is based on the finds’ proximity to kilns rather than the more solid petrographic analysis we have from Philistia and Cyprus. Finds of this type of pottery are almost completely absent from inland Anatolia and Syria. Imported Mycenaean IIIC:1 pottery of Aegean manufacture is also found at coastal Eastern Mediterranean sites.


The locally manufactured Mycenaean IIIC:1 finds are exact enough that local imitation of imports can probably be ruled out. Although local manufacture doesn’t necessitate an assumption of invasion, since it could as easily be the result of the migration of skilled craftsmen. Furthermore, many of the Mycenaean IIIC:1 forms found in the Aegean are completely absent among Eastern Mediterranean assemblages. In fact, those assemblages argued to be associated with the Sea Peoples have the most in common with Cypriot assemblages. For this reason, Late Helladic IIIC.1 has become the preferred term, so that the Cypriot, Cilician, and Levantine finds can be argued to be a distinct Eastern Mediterranean branch of the Late Helladic IIIC.1 tradition parallel to a regionally specific Mycenaean IIIC:1 tradition.





The Language of the Philistines:


Most of the Philistine language we know is Canaanite with a few foreign loan words and names, likely from their original language. Luwic, if not Luwian shows promise, particularly Carian. For example, there is a Carian name Wljat/Wliat, that appears in three Carian texts found in Egypt and some Greek sources as well. It’s probably a cognate of walli in Hittite and wallant in CLuwian. The meaning is something like “strong” in the physical and/or mental sense, and it’s been connected to PIE root with identified cognates in several Indo-European languages.


At Tell eṣ-Ṣâfi, which was Philistine Gath, a pot sherd was found in a solid Tenth to mid-Ninth Century Philistine context with a name Wlt written on it in the Canaanite script. The script records no vowels, but the consonants are identical. This is likely the same name that is recorded in Masoretic pronunciation as Gāləyāt, which you know as Goliath.


Without some particular linguistic background knowledge, it might not be apparent that the Goliath connection reinforces the Carian identity of the name, but Gāləyāt is pretty much exactly what you’d expect from Wliat being Hebrew-ized. In Hebrew, every consonant other than the last must carry a vowel and be its own syllable. For Hebrew, W is an uncomfortable sound to begin a word with except in certain contexts. W and G are both voiced velar phonemes. They only differ in articulation. That’s why you see shifting between them common in many languages. For example, Guillaume > William.


The Goliath story we have is set in the very late Eleventh Century, and Goliath is said to be from Gath, but the text itself probably didn’t take its final form earlier than the Seventh Century. That said, Gath was destroyed by Hazael of Aram-Damascus in about 830 BCE, so that along with several other lines of evidence suggests the story contains some authentic historical memories. The text of 2 Samuel 21:19 suggests some other guy from Bethlehem killed Goliath, so David may have been inserted into the legend some time after his reign.


In the biblical phrase “the lords of the Philistines”, the word translated as “lord” is sərān, spelled srn. This title is only ever used to refer to Philistine rulers. It has been argued both that the word is not Semitic and that it is a cognate of tyrannos. In fact, it may be a Northwest Semitic. Linguistically, the shift from š to s is quite common, as is the other direction. The š symbol is the “sh” sound in English, if that's not already clear. In the Canaanite languages, š is indicated by the letter shin, whereas s is indicated by the letter samekh. Even when there is a š > s pronunciation shift, Canaanite languages usually continue to represent the sound with a letter shin because this shows the relationship to its verbal root, which carries some of the nuances of the meaning. Scholars indicate a shifted shin with ś.


The Canaanite languages have a cognate to the Akkadian šarru (king) which is śar (prince, chieftain, commander). It’s pronounced like s, but spelled with a shin indicating that it used to be šar. Apparently, the reason Philistine sərān hasn’t been connected with the same root (š-r-r) is because it’s spelled in the Biblical texts with a samekh, so it was believed to be entirely of foreign origin, and let’s be honest, connecting it to tyrannos was just more appealing.


The use of the samekh could likewise suggest that the authors of the Biblical texts didn’t recognize it as a cognate, or at least that’s the conventional way of looking at these types of relationships, but after going looking for evidence, I now believe that it’s a reflection of how the Philistines themselves spelled it. As it turns out, the Ugaritic cognate is śrn (prince), more often spelled srn. Which fits with the fact that we now know there had been a Kingdom of Philistia just north of Ugarit prior to their arrival on the southern Levantine coast.


The Genetic Evidence from Ashkelon


Ancient DNA sheds light on the genetic origins of early Iron Age Philistines


Abstract: The ancient Mediterranean port city of Ashkelon, identified as “Philistine” during the Iron Age, underwent a marked cultural change between the Late Bronze and the early Iron Age. It has been long debated whether this change was driven by a substantial movement of people, possibly linked to a larger migration of the so-called “Sea Peoples.” Here, we report genome-wide data of 10 Bronze and Iron Age individuals from Ashkelon. We find that the early Iron Age population was genetically distinct due to a European-related admixture. This genetic signal is no longer detectible in the later Iron Age population. Our results support that a migration event occurred during the Bronze to Iron Age transition in Ashkelon but did not leave a long-lasting genetic signature.
“European-related admixture” is a little vague, and the authors never really get much more specific, so take a look at this:



Source


Light gray are modern populations, ancient samples are in color. One Iron Age I individual from Ashkelon isn't really any different from the local Late Bronze Age population. As you can see, another one is near to the Mycenaean samples and two are intermediate between the Levant and Mycenaeans. Although with a PCA based on admixture, there are multiple ways to arrive at the same position. Those two intermediate individuals are also within a cluster that includes Bronze Age Anatolians, Minoans, and ironically modern Ashkenazi Jews.


This evidence is at the very least consistent with the Philistines being partially of Luwian origin.
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