The Oxford History of the Biblical World (28 page)

The foreign countries [Sea Peoples] made a conspiracy in their islands. All at once the lands were removed and scattered in the fray. No land could stand before their arms, from Hatti, Kode [Cilicia], Carchemish, Arzawa, and Alashiya [Cyprus] on, being cut off at [one time]. A camp [was set up] in one place in Amor [Amurru]. They desolated its people, and its land was like that which has never come into being. They were coming forward toward Egypt, while the flame was prepared before them. Their confederation [of Sea Peoples] was the Philistines, Tjeker [Sikils], Shekelesh, Denye(n) and Weshesh, lands united. (Trans. John Wilson; p. 262 in James B. Pritchard, ed.,
Ancient Near Eastern Texts Relating to the Old Testament,
Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1969)

The Sea Peoples established beachheads along the entire coast of the eastern Mediterranean. Their route can be traced by the synchronous destructions of Late Bronze Age coastal cities from Tarsus to Ashkelon. The same pattern of devastation is found in several cities of Cyprus, which the raiders could have reached only by ship.

The renaming of whole territories after various groups of Sea Peoples provides another measure of their impact. After the Sea Peoples’ invasion of Cyprus, its name was changed from Alashiya to Yadanana, “the isle of the Danunians/Danaoi/Denyen.
” The Philistines bequeathed their own name to Philistia (and later to all of Palestine). The Sikils, who settled at Dor, also sailed west and gave their name to Sicily, and the Sherden, who probably established a beachhead in Acco, gave theirs to Sardinia.

On Cyprus the sequence of beachheads followed by stage 1 settlements is remarkably similar to those in the Levant. New cities, with Myc IIIC pottery, were built over the ruins of Late Bronze Age cities, many of which had received the last of the Greek imported pottery known as Myc IIIB. On the coastal promentories the newcomers built fortified strongholds, such as Maa and Pyla. Farther inland, the Sea Peoples founded new settlements, such as Sinda and Athienou.

Cypriot archaeologists invoke the Achaeans or Danaoi of Homeric epic as the agents of culture change in Cyprus; in the Levant, the same change is ascribed to the Sea Peoples. Both agents participated in the event recorded by Rameses III and should be related to the same confederacy of Sea Peoples, or Mycenaean Greeks, who invaded the coastlands and the island of Alashiya (Cyprus) around 1185-1175.

Correspondence between the king of Cyprus and the king of Ugarit can be correlated with the archaeology of destruction to provide vivid details of the Sea Peoples’ onslaught. The capital of a Syrian coastal kingdom under the suzerainty of the Hittites, Ugarit had over 150 villages in its hinterland and a population of 25,000, nearly the same as that of Philistia during stage 1. Its king also controlled a nearby port and had a seaside palace at Ras Ibn Hani.

During the final days of Ugarit, letters (in Akkadian cuneiform) exchanged between its king, Ammurapi, and the king of Cyprus show how desperate the situation was, as well as the source of the trouble. The Cypriot king writes to Ammurapi:

What have you written to me “enemy shipping has been sighted at sea”? Well, now, even if it is true that enemy ships have been sighted, be firm. Indeed then, what of your troops, your chariots, where are they stationed? Are they stationed close at hand or are they not? Fortify your towns, bring the troops and the chariots into them, and wait for the enemy with firm feet. (Sandars, 142-43)

Ammurapi replies:

My father, the enemy ships are already here, they have set fire to my towns and have done very great damage in the country. My father, did you not know that all my troops were stationed in the Hittite country, and that all my ships are still stationed in Lycia and have not yet returned? So that the country is abandoned to itself…. Consider this my father, there are seven enemy ships that have come and done very great damage. (Sandars, 143)

An earlier text explains to whom the marauding ships belong. The Hittite king writes (also in Akkadian) to a veteran official of Ammurapi about hostage taking:

From the sun, the great king, to the prefect: Now, with you, the king, your master, is young. He does not know anything. I gave orders to him regarding Lanadusu, who was taken captive by the Shikalayu, who live on ships. Now, I have sent to you Nisahili, he is an administrative official with me, with instructions. Now, you (are to) send Lanadusu, whom the Shikalayu captured, here to me. I will ask him about
the matter of the Shikila and, afterwards, he can return to Ugarit. (trans. Gregory Mobley)

The Sikils, “who live on ships,” were sea traders who were terrorizing Ugarit before it fell to them about 1185
BCE
, not long before events recorded by Rameses III, who also mentions the Sikils (Tjeker) as part of the Sea Peoples’ confederation.

In the Egyptian reliefs of the naval battle, the Sea Peoples’ ships are oared galleys with single sails and with finials in the shape of water birds at prow and stern. These resemble the “bird-boat” painted on a krater from Tiryns, another clue to their Aegean origin.

The Sikils then sailed down the coast and landed at Dor, identified as a city of the Sikils in the eleventh-century Egyptian tale of Wen-Amun. They destroyed the Late Bronze Age Canaanite city and constructed a much larger one over its ruins. During stage 1 the Sikils fortified Dor with ramparts and glacis, and created an excellent port facility for their ships.

All of this evidence—their beachheads, the coastal pattern of destruction (followed in many cases by new cities with Myc IIIC pottery), references to living on ships, and illustrations of their craft—leave no doubt that the Sea Peoples, including the Philistines, had the necessary maritime technology and transport capacity to effect a major migration and invasion by sea.

From Egyptian texts and wall reliefs at Medinet Habu, a reconstruction of the battle between Rameses III and the Sea Peoples and its aftermath has been developed that has attained nearly canonical status. According to this reconstruction, the Sea Peoples came to the Levant by land and by sea. The reliefs show whole families trekking overland in ox-drawn carts, and warriors in horse-drawn chariots fighting with the Egyptians in a land battle on the northern borders of Canaan. A flotilla of their ships even penetrated the Nile Delta before Rameses III repelled them. After his victory, Rameses III engaged troops of the defeated Sea Peoples as mercenaries for his garrisons in Canaan and Nubia, and reasserted Egyptian sovereignty over southern Canaan. Egypt once again controlled the vital military and commercial highway successively known as the Ways of Horus, the Way of the Land of the Philistines (Exod. 13.17), and the Way of the Sea (Isa. 9.1).

Some Egyptologists have rightly challenged this reconstruction. The wall reliefs of Rameses III show only one scene of departure before the land battle and only one scene of victory celebration after the sea battle. The Sea Peoples threatened the Egyptians at the mouth of the Nile, not in far-off northern Canaan. If the Philistines had settled in southern Canaan before 1175
BCE
, when the battle for the Nile Delta took place, both the chariotry and the oxcarts could have come from their settlements there; they would not need to be interpreted as transport for a long overland trek of Sea Peoples through Anatolia into the Levant. As we have seen, they migrated by sea.

The hypothesis that Rameses III reestablished Egyptian control over Canaan and used Philistine mercenaries in his garrisons there was apparently bolstered by the evidence of the clay anthropoid coffins found at such Egyptian strongholds as Bethshan, Tell el-Farah (S), and Lachish. At Tell el-Farah (S), the discovery of large bench
tombs with anthropoid clay sarcophagi, Egyptian artifacts, and Philistine bichrome pottery led the excavator, Sir Flinders Petrie, to conclude that these were the sepulchers of the “five lords of the Philistines.” Other scholars proposed Cypriot and Aegean prototypes for the style of the bench tombs themselves. One of the anthropoid clay coffins from Beth-shan had a feathered headdress, which was compared with the headgear of the Philistines, Denyen, and Sikils shown on the Medinet Habu reliefs. But in the 1970s excavations at the cemetery of Deir el-Balah, southwest of Gaza, uncovered dozens more of these clay coffins dating to the Late Bronze Age, a century or two before the Sea Peoples arrived in Canaan.

The ideal for Egyptians living abroad was to be buried back in Egypt. However, with the expansion of the New Kingdom empire, more Egyptian troops were stationed abroad, in both Canaan and Nubia, and it became impractical to return every Egyptian corpse to the homeland. But Egyptians who died outside Egypt could at least be buried abroad in suitable containers, such as anthropoid clay coffins.

Further support for interpreting the anthropoid clay coffins as Egyptian comes from a sarcophagus excavated at Lachish, in a tomb dating to the time of Rameses III. On this coffin is a depiction of the Egyptian deities Isis and Nephthys, along with an inscription that some have labeled Egyptian pseudohieroglyphs or Philistine gibberish. But some Egyptologists have interpreted the text as a perfectly good Egyptian funerary inscription: “Thou givest water [a traditional mortuary offering] (of the) West [the region of the dead] to the majesty (of) thy […].”

Thus the most parsimonious hypothesis is that the anthropoid sarcophagi found in Canaan in the Late Bronze and the Iron I periods belonged to Egyptians stationed there, and should not be connected with the Sea Peoples and their burial customs. When so interpreted, these coffins are important evidence for delineating cultural (and hence political) boundaries between Canaanite territory still under Egyptian control and Philistia.

During stage 1 the Philistines occupied a large region in southern Canaan, taking it from the Canaanites and their overlords, the Egyptians. The boundaries of this territory can be plotted by using settlements whose ceramic repertoire has more than 25 percent Myc IIIC pottery. This rectangular coastal strip was about 20 kilometers (12 miles) wide and 50 kilometers (31 miles) long and had an area of 1,000 square kilometers (386 square miles), and the Philistines located their five major cities at key positions along its perimeter. Unlike the Egyptians, the Philistines did not govern their territory by installing military garrisons within Canaanite population centers. Rather, they completely destroyed those centers, and then built their own new cities on the ruins of the old. This wholesale takeover must have resulted in the death or displacement of much of the Late Bronze Age population.

Along the northern coast of their territory, the Philistines destroyed by fire the large Egyptian fortress at Tel Mor and the neighboring city of Ashdod. Over the ruins of Ashdod they built a new city, while the Egyptians rebuilt the fortress at Tel Mor, although on a smaller scale. Farther inland, some 20 kilometers (12 miles) to the east, was the small Canaanite city of Ekron (Tel Miqne), about 4 hectares (10 acres) in area. The Philistines burned it too, and over its ruins raised a city five times larger than its predecessor, with massive mud-brick fortifications and organized on a grand scale. In the layer of occupation were found large quantities of Myc IIIC pottery.
Northeast of Ekron was Gezer, a major Canaanite city from which some of the Amarna letters had been sent. At the end of the Late Bronze Age it too was destroyed by fire, either by the Philistines or by Pharaoh Merneptah in his campaign of 1209. In any case, Gezer, with no evidence of Myc IIIC, was rebuilt as an Egypto-Canaanite counterforce to Ekron during the reign of Rameses III. A faience vase bearing cartouches with that pharaoh’s name is associated with this level of occupation, but there is no Myc IIIC pottery. A small percentage of Philistine bichrome pottery appears later, during stage 2.

The Late Bronze Age city of Ashkelon, on the Mediterranean coast between Ashdod and Gaza, was also destroyed, either by Merneptah or (more probably) by the Philistines. Egyptian policy was to garrison and control, not eradicate, the Canaanite population. There the Philistines built their main seaport, which during stage 1 must have extended along the coast for almost a kilometer (over half a mile) and occupied an area of 50 to 60 hectares (125-150 acres). Later, in the early Iron II period, the preexisting arc of earthen ramparts was fortified at the northern crest by two large mud-brick towers linked by a mud-brick curtain wall. Opposite this Philistine stronghold, about 30 kilometers (18 miles) to the east, Rameses III established another Egyptian control center at Lachish. Hardly a trace of Philistine bichrome pottery has been found there, but archaeologists have uncovered an Egyptian-inspired temple, hieratic bowl inscriptions recording taxes paid to the Egyptians, a large bronze gate-fitting inscribed with the name of Rameses III, and two anthropoid coffins, all attesting to the presence of an Egyptian garrison.

Philistia’s eastern boundary during stage 1 was a 50-kilometer (31-mile) line from Ekron in the north to Tel Haror in the south, some 20 kilometers (12 miles) inland from Gaza. At Haror, the Philistines devastated the Late Bronze Age city, and both Egyptian and Myc IIIB pottery were found in the destruction debris. Above the ruins rose a new Philistine settlement, with Myc IIIC pottery as at the pentapolis sites.

Just across the border from Haror was another Egyptian center, Tell esh-Shariah. A large Egyptian administrative building or governor’s residency, several hieratic bowl inscriptions, and Egyptian pottery all attest to Rameses Ill’s containment policy. During stage 2, the Egyptians abandoned Shariah and it became a Philistine city, probably to be identified with biblical Ziklag. According to 1 Samuel 27.1-7, Ziklag was subject to Achish, the ruler of Gath, who gave this country town to his loyal retainer David and his personal army of six hundred men. Gath itself, Achish’s capital and Goliath’s hometown, is usually located at Tell es-Safi. But this site’s proximity to Ekron, its distance from Ziklag, and the paucity of Myc IIIC pottery there make this an unlikely identification. Gath should be strategically located in the southeast corner of Philistia during stage 1, not far from its dependency Ziklag during stage 2; if so, the most plausible candidate for Gath is Tel Haror, which has both Philistine monochrome and bichrome pottery. Regardless of the identifications, it seems clear that Haror was inside and Shariah outside Philistine territory during stage 1, but both were within the Philistine domain during stage 2.