The paper examines the longstanding Philistine Paradigm within the context of archaeological and historical research, questioning its viability in light of new evidence. It critically assesses the traditional views surrounding the Philistine invasion of Canaan, evaluating interpretations based on ancient records and archaeological finds. The discussion aims to address the complexities surrounding the understanding of Philistine identity and its implications for broader historical narratives of the Eastern Mediterranean during the second millennium B.C.

The present study deals with relations between Egypt and the Levant during the Second Intermediate Period, based primarily on contemporary scarabs from both regions. The potential contribution of scarabs for the historical reconstruction of the Second Intermediate Period, especially with regard to Egyptian/Levantine relations, has long been recognized. Yet the controversy over scarab typologies ruled out scarabs as a reliable historical source. This study proposes a new typology of scarabs of the first half of the second millennium BCE, which is now feasible owing to recent studies of ceramic assemblages from Egypt and the Levant. Based on these studies one can determine the relative and absolute dates of deposits in which scarabs and scarab impressions have been found in both regions, and substantiate the corrrespondence of the Second Intermediate Period in Egypt with the Middle Bronze Age IIB in the Levant. The principal methodological difference between the present study and previous scarab studies is its treatment of the Egyptian and Palestinian series as two separate groups. The geographical classification of the large corpus of scarabs, which previously had been dealt with as one entity, allowed for a systematic differentiation between Egyptian and Canaanite scarabs of this period and the establishment of separate stylistic and chronological typologies for each group. The historical conclusions presented in this study confirm the significance of scarabs as a primary source of information for reconstructing the history of the Second Intermediate Period in Egypt and the Levant.

Age (e.g., Sass 1983; 2010; Golani and Sass 1998; Finkelstein et al. 2008; Finkelstein and Sass 2013). As we have spent the last 20-odd years studying the Philistine culture, it is with much pleasure that we present in Benny's honor this study of the definitions and relations between the Philistines and their neighbors in the region of the Shephelah during the early Iron Age. In a few recent discussions on the early Iron Age in southern Canaan and the cultural and ethnic entities existing at the time, particularly in Philistia and the Shephelah, the suggestion was raised that a distinct Canaanite entity (or enclave) can be identified in the Shephelah, e.g., Bunimovitz and Lederman 2009, 2011; Na'aman 2010; Faust and Katz 2011, 2015; Faust 2013, 2015d; Lederman and Bunimovitz 2014. This enclave was supposedly situated between the Philistines located to the west on the Coastal Plain and the Israelites located to the east in the Central Hills. In this brief paper, we would like to examine some of the suppositions, and relevant data, regarding the existence of this putative Canaanite enclave. The study of the Philistines and their culture has seen a floruit in the last few decades. Excavations at major urban and smaller rural sites, along with many topical studies, have produced much new data and many new interpretations. Among other issues, the question of how to identify a site as being of the Philistine culture, and even more basically, how the various levels of "Philistine identity" can be archaeologically defined, has been avidly discussed. Unfortunately, some of the attempts to differentiate between the "Philistines" and other ethnicities in the Iron Age Levant on the basis of a small set of material correlates have led to simplistic or simply mistaken differentiations. Thus, suggestions to characterize what we might call the "Philistinicity" of a site based on a small group of traits (often related to as Philistine type fossils) such as the presence/ absence of decorated Philistine pottery (particularly in drinking sets), consumption of pig and dog meat, "Aegean-style" pinched loom weights ("spools"), hearths, "Cypriot-style" notched scapulae, rectangular halls with worked column or pillar bases, are problematic at best. As already noted in the past, many of these specific cultural attributes can appear on "both sides" of the supposed Philistine/ Israelite ethnic boundaries-and even beyond (Hitchcock and Maeir 2013; Maeir et al. 2013; Maeir and Hitchcock in press). 1 Clearly, when viewed as a whole, the material assemblages at major sites in Iron Age Philistia are different from those of sites in regions associated with other groups (Israelite, Judahite, Phoenician, etc.). But time and again, specific types of objects can be seen in many areas and are used by many groups (such as pottery types appearing in different cultural areas; see, e.g., Ben-Shlomo et al. 2008). The appearance of supposedly Philistine objects should not be seen as necessarily indicating the expansion of the Philistine culture into other zones, and similarly, for the appearance of Israelite/Judahite facets among the Philistines. Rather, artifact assemblages should be examined in their contexts in order to draw out different cultural encounters, functions and entanglements as well as to elucidate new ones (e.g., Ross 2012).

Tel Aviv 38 (1): 94-119, 2011

In the absence of chronological anchors for the twelfth century BCE in southern Canaan, scholars have often relied on two interrelated, geopolitical events that affected the region at this time: first, the migration and settlement of the Philistines; and, second, the withdrawal of the Egyptian hegemonic presence. According to the traditional paradigm, the Philistines wrested control of southern coastal Canaan from Egypt ca. 1175 BCE. Recent revisionist theories, however, hold that the Philistines arrived after the Egyptian withdrawal from the region at about 1130 BCE. At the heart of the matter lie the following questions: Did the Philistines and Egyptians coexist and, if they did, were their material culture boundaries impermeable? An examination of sites that possess either Philistine or Egyptianized material culture may provide an answer. An analysis of the excavations at Tel Mor, a small Egyptian outpost located close to the Philistine city of Ashdod, is an especially important case study in this regard.

S. Richard (ed.). New Horizons in the Study of the Early Bronze Age III and Early Bronze Age IV of the Levant University Park, PA: Eisenbrauns pp. 149-168, 2020

Results of the Associated Regional Chronologies for the Ancient Near East Project (ARCANE) have produced a sweeping new dating schema for Western Asia. In particular, the radiocarbon-based “High Chronology” for the southern Levant fundamentally changes the dating of the Early Bronze Age periodisations on which the archaeology of the region is based. This period covered by the ARCANE Project is coeval with the Egyptian First Dynasty to First Intermediate Period, covering the late fourth and third millennia B.C. A significant opportunity has thus emerged to examine interregional engagement in the eastern Mediterranean. Within this new framework, assessment of archaeological and radiocarbon data from both Egypt and the Levant exposes the need for a transformation of traditional constructions of international relations and the dynamics behind the collapse of urban entities. This paper examines some implications of the High Chronology for our understanding of Egyptian relations with the southern Levant.

Egypt and the Levant , 2007

Oxford Journal of Archaeology, 2017

The Philistine paradigm attempts to answer fundamental questions in Philistine history, namely the how and when of Philistine settlement in the southern Levant. According to the traditional paradigm, the Philistines, among other 'Sea-Peoples', came from the Aegean islands and were settled in Egyptian strongholds in the south Canaanite Coastal Plain in the eighth year of Ramesses III. Formulated on the basis of Egyptian texts and Philistine archaeological remains, the paradigm has been criticized over the reliability of both source materials. Therefore, it is the aim of the present study to conduct a methodological analysis of the pillars on which the paradigm rests and to offer a new reconstruction of the events that took place in the Levant in the twelfth century BCE.

Essential to an understanding of the early history of the Philistines is their relationship to Twentieth Dynasty Egypt. Egyptian texts, particularly Papyrus Harris I and the Great Inscription at Medinet Habu, have informed the debate over how and when the Philistines came to be settled in southern coastal Canaan. According to the traditional paradigm, the Egyptians forcibly garrisoned the Philistines in southern Canaan after 1174 BCE, which corresponds to the eighth year of Ramesses III’s reign. Increasingly over the past dozen years, however, both the circumstances and the date of the Philistines’ settlement have been called into question. An assessment of these revisionist theories, on the basis of an examination of both textual and archaeological data, is the subject of this paper.

Tel Aviv, 1995

Egypt and Philistia in the Early Iron Age: The Textual Record and the Archaeological Remains, 2014

Egypt and the Levant , 2016

Here I deal with two recent attempts to radiocarbon-date the transition from the Late Bronze to the Iron I and the arrival of the Philistines based on samples from Tell es-Safi/Gath and Qubur el-Walaydah. I first detail five conditions for constructing a proper radiocarbon model aimed at resolving a historical question, especially in the case of a dispute involving no more than a few decades. I then demonstrate that the situation in the relevant areas at Tell es-Safi/Gath and Qubur el-Walaydah-stratigraphy, contexts and control over ceramic typology-do not adhere to these conditions. Finally, I assemble and compare all available radiocarbon data for the Late Bronze IIB/III and the Late Bronze III/Iron I transitions and comment on two issues related to the traditional Philistine paradigm.

Near Eastern Archaeology, 2018

ABSTRACT (Request PDF) The excavations at Tell es-Safi/Gath have contributed to the formation of a unique collaboration of different area and scientific specialists, that have made it possible to formulate more detailed accounts of the Philistines. These accounts have been inspired by new discoveries which point to traditions associated with many different parts of the Mediterranean such as Cyprus, Greece, the Aegean islands, Anatolia, and Italy. These discoveries represent the globalized flow of information, people, technologies, and goods that characterized the Late Bronze Age. Such discoveries have led us to search for and develop new hypotheses for the emergence of the Sea Peoples that involve cultural entanglement and mixing, studies of regionalism, and cross-cultural comparison with other Iron Age cultures.

Radiocarbon, 2001

A number of recent radiocarbon determinations from several sites in Israel suggest advancing, by some considerable period of time, both the onset of the cultural horizon known as Early Bronze I and the appearance of its latest phases. The logical outcome of the acceptance of these new dates puts such a strain on chronological correlations between the 14C data and the archaeological record that the entire system would no longer be tenable if they were accepted. This paper examines in detail the problematic nature of these “uneasy correlations.”

Mynářová, J. - Kilani, M. - Alivernini, S. (eds.), A Stranger in the House - the Crossroads III. Proceedings of an International Conference on Foreigners in Ancient Egyptian and Near Eastern Societies of the Bronze Age held in Prague, September 10–13, 2018. Prague: Charles University., 2019

Egypt and the Near East. Interactions between these regions are attested from the earliest days when the first political centers started to develop in both parts of the ancient world. For this period, our information on Egyptians living “abroad” is very limited. We can hardly hope to obtain a complete picture of both the daily life of an individual and the foreign policy of the Egyptian rulers based on the evidence we currently have at our disposal. The interpretation of the Egyptian policy towards the Near Eastern polities and their peoples is hence largely dependent on the interpretation of the character of the Egyptian (or Egyptianizing) objects discovered in Near Eastern sites. The same holds true for the Near Eastern perspective as well. During the third millennium BC, the picture provided by the limited number and much formalized character of the Egyptian written evidence is often supplemented by iconographic and archaeological sources. Moreover, there are practically no ancient Near Eastern records mentioning Egyptians living “abroad”. It is only in the second half of the second millennium BC, when the written evidence—both Egyptian and non-Egyptian—becomes sufficient to provide a more detailed account on the Egyptians living “outside the Egyptian borders”. In my paper I will address the question of evidence of Egyptians living in the Near East. The Egyptian sources provide us only with one part of the story—the Egyptian one. But I will rather pay attention to the evidence provided by Near Eastern written documents, mentioning Egypt and especially Egyptians, being part of local communities. This evidence will be set against the perspective provided by official sources, preserved on both sides.

The Predynastic settlement of Maadi—after which the Chalcolithic Lower Egyptian Culture of the fi rst half of the 4 th millennium is named—is a key site for the understanding of the interconnections between Lower and Upper Egypt, as well as between the Nile valley and the Southern Levant. Although at fi rst glance it was a rural village with agriculture as subsistence basis, the settlement—on the one hand—yielded Upper Egyptian imports which point to trade relations within the Nile valley and which enable to place the settlement into the frame of the Naqada culture chronology. On the other hand, there is evidence for different phases of connections to the southern Levant: Unusual semi-subterranean cave-like structures which—although much less sophisticated— resemble the subterranean installations of the Chalcolithic Beersheva Culture. Later still Maadi must have operated trade connections with several EB IA settlements in southern Palestine to acquire copper and other commodities. This chronologically diverging evidence is discussed here and complemented by a series of radiocarbon dates retrieved from renewed excavations at Maadi by the German Archaeological Institute, Cairo. The dates confi rm that the chronological position of the settlement is contemporaneous with the transition from the Late Chalcolithic to the Early Bronze Age in the Southern Levant. Résumé : L'établissement Prédynastique de Maadi, qui a donné son nom à la culture chalcolithique de Basse-Égypte de la première moitié du 4 e millénaire, est un site clé pour la compréhension des interconnections entre la Haute et la Basse-Égypte, et entre la Vallée du Nil et le sud du Levant. Si l'établissement évoque à première vue un village rural fondé sur l'agriculture, le site a révélé des importations venant de Haute-Égypte, suggérant des relations commerciales dans la Vallée du Nil et permettant de situer cet établissement dans la chronologie de la culture de Naqada. En outre, le site a révélé l'existence de différentes phases de relations avec le sud du Levant : des structures inhabituelles, semi-souterraines, ressemblent aux installations souterraines de la culture chalcolithique de Beersheva, bien que moins sophistiquées que ces dernières. Plus tard, Maadi semble avoir établi des relations commerciales avec des sites du Bronze ancien IA dans le sud de la Palestine, afi n d'obtenir du cuivre et d'autres marchandises. Ces données, divergentes chronologiquement, sont commentées et complétées par une série de datations radiocarbones issues des nouvelles fouilles menées à Maadi par l'Institut archéologique allemand au Caire (DAI). Ces dates confi rment que l'établissement est contemporain de la transition entre le Chalcolithique récent et le Bronze ancien dans le sud du Levant.

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