You Philistine … it’s now a compliment

After centuries of bad press, it’s time to rescue the reputation of the Philistines.

Archaeologists extract skeletons at the site of Ashkelon. Picture: AFP

After centuries of bad press, it’s time to rescue the reputation of the Philistines.

Research has offered a new insight into a people that prospered on the eastern edge of the Medit­erranean 3000 years ago and are remembered today as the thuggish arch-enemies of the biblical Israelites. They did not, it appears, deserve that most stinging of ­insults: philistine.

Analysis of ancient DNA recovere­d from the ruined Philistine city of Ashkelon, on Israel’s Mediterranean coast, suggests their ancestors travelled from southern Europe at the close of the Bronze Age, a time of upheava­l and collapsing empires.

The work caps a 30-year excav­ation of the settlement that has transformed understanding of Philistine culture, revealing it to have been wealthy, worldly and highly accomplished.

Genetic findings also suggest the Philistines may have had Greek roots. This gives credence to a theory they were descendants of warriors who never made it home from the Trojan War.

The Philistine most familiar today is Goliath, the giant felled, according to the Old Testament, by a pebble cast from the sling of David. The excavation of Ash­kelon has shown how Goliath’s compatriots built cleverly ­designed cities, crafted exquisite ceramics and valued good wine. They had a cosmopolitan lifestyle while the Israelites were farming sheep in the hills.

“The Philistines left no texts. The descriptions of them that we have, including the Hebrew Bible, were written by their enemies,” said Michal Feldman of the Max Planck Institute.

Ashkelon was destroyed by the Babylonian armies of king Nebuchadnezzar II in 604BC.

Since the 1980s, archaeolog­ists from Harvard University have found stone altars as well as pottery, handsome buildings and a winepress. Finer craftsmanship of the time was impossible to imagin­e, they said.

Daniel Master of Wheaton College, Illinois, said: “The Philistines were merchants. They borrowed­ things from other cultures­, made them their own. They kept up with the times.”

Other artefacts suggest they possessed a mastery of copper smelting that would not be matched until the Romans, centuries­ later. One summary of the Ashkelon finds describes them as “great traders, master builders and one of the most civilised­ peoples of their time”.

There are only scant references to their origins in ancient texts. In the Book of Amos in the Old Testament there is a mention of them coming from “Caphtor”, a Bronze Age name for Crete. An ancient Egyptian source, etched in hieroglyphics, also hints that they swept in from the west.

The DNA evidence agrees. Scientists looked at genetic materia­l from the remains of 10 individuals found in the Ashkelon area during the Bronze Age and Iron Age, between about 3600 and 2800 years ago.

It suggest the Philistines descend­ed from migrants who travelled across the Mediterran­ean, possibly from Greece, Sardin­ia or Iberia. These travellers appear to have reached the shores of the southern Levant about 3200 years ago, matching the Philistines’ estimated arrival.

Sources date the fall of Troy to about the same time.

“It’s not a trivial thing for a large group of people to move across the Mediterranean and settle, so there must have been something motivating them,” said Ms Feldman, co-author of the study published yesterday in the journal Science Advances “There were a number of events during this time: the Trojan wars, the collapse of the Mycenaean empire, the fall of the Hittite empire­. Maybe they did have some connection; maybe they were refugees from these events.”

The Times