The Philistines

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A relief on the mortuary temple of Ramesses III at Medinet Habu, west of Thebes, shows a sea battle in the Nile delta: Egyptian archers raking a fleet of strange ships whose prows end in bird-heads, the foreign crews in feathered crowns, some already pulled from the water and bound. The accompanying text dates the fighting to the pharaoh’s eighth year, around 1175 BCE, and names among the attackers a people the Egyptian scribes wrote as Peleset. Within a generation that same name had fixed itself to a stretch of the Canaanite coast — and within three millennia it would attach, by a long accident of language, to a whole region and to a word for everything those Egyptian carvers were not painting: the dullard, the enemy of culture, the soul that cannot see.

Out of the sea, into Canaan

The Peleset belonged to the loose coalition that modern scholarship calls the Sea Peoples — the bands of raiders and migrants who churned across the eastern Mediterranean in the decades around 1200 BCE, when the great Bronze Age order came apart. The Hittite empire fell; the Mycenaean palaces burned; the trade routes that had bound the basin together for centuries went dark. The causes are still argued — drought, earthquake, internal collapse, the raiders themselves — but the result is plain in the destruction layers from Greece to the Levant. Into that wreckage the Sea Peoples moved, and the Egyptian record is the fullest we have of their passage. Ramesses III claims to have met them twice, by land and by sea, and to have broken them at the frontier of Egypt; the Medinet Habu inscriptions list the Peleset alongside the Tjeker, the Shekelesh, the Denyen, the Weshesh.

Captives in the feathered headdress of the Sea Peoples, relief at Medinet Habu, mortuary temple of Ramesses III (12th c. BCE). Photo: Panegyrics of Granovetter, CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons.

Where, exactly, the Peleset had come from before they reached Egypt’s frontier is the question the Egyptian texts do not answer. Ramesses III’s scribes say only that the Sea Peoples “made a conspiracy in their islands,” that they came from the north, that no land could stand before them — Hatti, Arzawa, Cyprus, Carchemish all fell in their path, the inscription claims, before they turned on Egypt. The word “islands” has long pointed the search toward the Aegean, and a much later memory in the Bible itself names a homeland: the prophets Amos and Jeremiah call the Philistines the “remnant of Caphtor,” and Caphtor is generally identified with Crete. For most of the twentieth century this remained a literary clue in want of physical proof. The proof, when it came, would come from the ground and from the genome.

Repulsed from Egypt, the Peleset settled — the Egyptian and the biblical records agree on this — along the southern coast of Canaan, the low, fertile plain running south from the Yarkon to the desert. There they built, or took over and rebuilt, the cities that the Hebrew Bible would know as their league of five: the Pentapolis. The books of Joshua and First Samuel name them together — Gaza, Ashkelon, and Ashdod on or near the sea, Ekron and Gath inland on the edge of the Judean foothills. Each was ruled by a lord whose title the Bible gives as seren, a word with no good Semitic root, which many scholars connect to the Greek tyrannos, “lord” — a fossil, perhaps, of the language the newcomers carried with them. The five lords acted in council, the biblical accounts suggest, deliberating together over war and over the troublesome Ark; it is a confederation of city-kings rather than a single kingdom, and the form, like so much else, looks back toward the Aegean world of competing palace-states from which the migrants seem to have come.

The Aegean in the dirt

For most of recorded history the Philistines were known only through the eyes of their enemies, and the picture was a flat one: a brutish, uncircumcised, iron-hoarding foe. The excavations of the last century have replaced it with something far stranger and more specific. The newcomers arrived on the Canaanite shore carrying a material culture that was not Canaanite at all but Aegean, and the dirt of their cities records it stratum by stratum.

The clearest signature is the pottery. In the first level of Philistine settlement the potters of Ashdod, Ekron, and the other cities made wheel-thrown wares in the late Mycenaean manner — the style archaeologists label Mycenaean IIIC — and then developed it into a distinctive painted ware that William F. Albright, in 1924, named Philistine Bichrome: black and red figures on a white slip, decorated with the motifs of a seafaring people who had come from across the water, birds preening backward over their wings, fish, spirals, and ships. It is among the most accomplished painted pottery of its age, and it was made by the people whose name became the synonym for having no taste.

Philistine bichrome beer jug from Tel Eton, 12th c. BCE, Israel Museum. The strainer-spout filtered the grain husks from the brew. Photo: Hanay, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons.

The break with the surrounding Canaanite world ran deeper than decoration. In the Philistine cities the cooks built round, raised hearths of a type at home in the Aegean, not the Levant; the weavers hung their looms with unperforated cylindrical loom-weights of a kind known from Cyprus and the Mycenaean world, not the local flat doughnut-shaped sort. They ate dog on occasion, and above all they ate pig — the pig bones pile up in the early Philistine levels at Ekron and Ashkelon in proportions unknown among their neighbors, a dietary line that set them apart from the Israelites and Canaanites who avoided the animal. Their names, where the Bible preserves them, resist Semitic explanation: Achish, the king of Gath to whom David fled; Goliath, the champion of Gath; the seren itself. Each detail, taken alone, is suggestive; taken together, they describe a population that arrived from somewhere west of Canaan and kept its old habits for several generations before the surrounding culture absorbed them.

In 2019 the question of origin moved from inference to the genome. A team led by Michal Feldman at the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History sequenced ancient DNA from ten individuals buried at Ashkelon across the Bronze and Iron Ages. The early Iron Age dead — the first Philistine generations — carried an additional European-derived ancestry, absent from the Bronze Age Canaanite population that preceded them and best modeled as a southern European source. The genetic newcomers had crossed the Mediterranean and reached the coast just as the Peleset of the Egyptian texts appeared in the record. The same study supplied the coda the archaeology had already hinted at: within two centuries the European signal had largely washed out, diluted by intermarriage into the Levantine gene pool around them. The people still called Philistines in the ninth century were, genetically, mostly their Canaanite neighbors. The migration was real; so was the absorption.

The grain-god and the iron foe

The newcomers did not bring their old gods, or did not keep them long. In their new land the Philistines worshipped the deities of the country they had entered, and the chief of them, in the biblical memory, was Dagon — an ancient West Semitic god of grain and the cultivated land, lord of the river country far to the north, who had been honored at Ebla and Mari for the better part of two millennia before the sea-people took him up. He had temples at Ashdod and at Gaza. Beside him the Bible names a goddess at Ashkelon and a fly-god, Baal-zebub, at Ekron; the Canaanite divine world the Philistines settled into was the same continuum of gods — El the patriarch, Baal the storm-king, the goddesses Astarte and Anat — that the tablets of Ugarit had recorded a few centuries earlier on the northern coast.

What the Philistines themselves held about these gods is almost entirely lost, because the texts that describe their cult are their enemies’. The two great scenes are both stories of defeat. In the book of Samuel the Philistines capture the Ark of the Covenant in battle and carry it into the temple of Dagon at Ashdod; the next morning the god’s statue is found fallen on its face before it, and the morning after, fallen again and broken at the threshold, the head and hands struck off. In the book of Judges the strongman Samson, blinded and chained, is brought into a crowded temple of Dagon at Gaza to be mocked, and pulls the two central pillars down upon the assembled worshippers and himself. The temple of the grain-god is, in both, a stage set for his humiliation — and yet the stories preserve, against their own intention, the hard fact that the Aegean-descended newcomers had become devout servants of an inland Semitic god and built him houses in their chief cities.

Their place in the biblical narrative is fixed: they are the iron-age enemy against whom early Israel defined itself. They held the lowland and pressed up into the hills; they captured the Ark; their champion Goliath of Gath stood in the Valley of Elah, the giant in bronze whom the shepherd David felled with a sling. Saul, Israel’s first king, died fighting them on Mount Gilboa, and the Philistines fastened his body to the wall of Beth-shan and his armor in a temple of Astarte. David, who had once sheltered as a vassal of Achish king of Gath, finally broke their grip. The Bible credits them with a monopoly on ironworking that let them disarm their Israelite subjects — a detail archaeology treats with caution, since iron was not yet the decisive military metal the verse implies, but one that captures the remembered weight of Philistine power in the centuries when their league dominated the coast.

That hostile portrait is, paradoxically, the reason the Philistines are remembered at all by the wider world — and the reason the remembering went so wrong. They left no literature of their own, no annals, no epic, no theology set down to survive; what little they wrote that lasts is a handful of inscriptions and seal-impressions. Everything else in the textual record comes filtered through Israelite scribes for whom the Philistines were the archetypal foreign oppressor, and through the Egyptian propaganda of a pharaoh advertising his victory. A people is easy to caricature when only its enemies hold the pen. The biblical authors had no interest in the Aegean hearths or the painted ships on the jugs; they recorded the uncircumcision, the strange gods, the giants and the iron, and from those few hostile strokes the later world built its whole image of the Philistine — an image that the cities themselves, lying mute under their tells, would one day contradict.

The royal dedicatory inscription found at Ekron in 1996 gives the one extended glimpse of these kings in their own voice. Carved on a limestone block in the seventh century, it records a ruler named Ikausu son of Padi — Ikausu being the same name as the biblical Achish — dedicating a temple to a goddess whose name is written Ptgyh, and lists five generations of his fathers before him. Padi and Ikausu both appear in the Neo-Assyrian royal annals, which anchors the dynasty in datable history. By then the Philistines wrote a Canaanite dialect in a Canaanite script and bore, alongside their old non-Semitic names, the gods and language of the people among whom they had settled. The assimilation the genome recorded had run its full course.

The end of the league and the long slander

Independence ended under the Assyrian war machine. From the mid-eighth century the kings of Assyria came down the coast: Tiglath-pileser III brought the Philistine cities under tribute; Sargon II took Ashdod in 712 and Gath the year after; Sennacherib, in 701, broke a coalition that the Ekron of king Padi had joined. The cities survived as Assyrian and then Egyptian dependencies until Nebuchadnezzar II of Babylon, sweeping through in 604 and 603, destroyed Ashkelon and Ekron and carried their populations off. After the Babylonian deportations the Philistines vanish from history as a distinct people, their cities resettled, their identity dissolved into the wider Near Eastern world — though Gath, the largest of the five, had already fallen earlier and harder: the excavations of Aren Maeir at Tell es-Safi have laid bare a vast destruction layer, ringed by the earliest siege works known to archaeology, left by Hazael of Aram-Damascus around 830 BCE.

The name outlived the people. The Greeks, who knew the southern Levant through its coast, took the Hebrew Peleshet — the land of the Philistines — and called the whole region Palaistinē; Herodotus uses the term in the fifth century BCE, and when the emperor Hadrian crushed the Bar Kokhba revolt in 135 CE and renamed the province of Judaea, he made it Syria Palaestina. The word that names Palestine is, at root, the name of the sea-people who once held its shore.

The other afterlife is the cruel one. By way of the Bible’s hostile portrait — the brutes, the uncircumcised, the enemies of the chosen — and then by way of a German pun, the Philistines lent their name to the boor. The trail can be followed precisely. In the university town of Jena, a riot between students and townsfolk left several dead in 1689, and the cleric Georg Heinrich Götze preached a sermon on the text from the book of Judges, “the Philistines be upon you” — the words shouted to Samson. German students fastened the word Philister onto the townsman, the non-academic, the dull respectable burgher who knew nothing of higher things; it spread through German Romanticism as the term for the enemy of art and spirit, and in the nineteenth century Matthew Arnold carried it into English, where “philistine” settled into its modern sense of the person blind to culture.

There is no straightening the irony, only stating it. The word for the man who cannot see beauty descends from a people whose painters covered their jugs with birds and fish in red and black, whose cities were laid out and walled, whose origin lay in the same Aegean world that gave Europe its first art — a people known for three thousand years almost solely through the polemic of their rivals, and recovered, jug by bone by gene, only when the spade went into the mounds of their five cities and began to read what the texts had refused to.

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