Excavating Ekron

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The Philistines were the chief adversary of Biblical Israel in the 12th and 11th centuries B.C.E. They were also the conquerors of the Canaanite cities of the southern coastal plain.¹ At the beginning of the first millennium B.C.E., however, the Philistine cities were destroyed and the Philistines themselves seem to have become a casualty of history, as they apparently disappeared from the archaeological and historical record. This was the conclusion of most historians and archaeologists—until we began to excavate the Philistine site of Tel Miqne (Biblical Ekron), on the border of the Israelite hill country, 22 miles southwest of Jerusalem.² Israeli archaeologist Trude Dothan and I jointly directed this excavation for 14 seasons before we concluded in 1996.³ The excavation produced dramatic 042new evidence that has radically altered our understanding of Philistine history.

What were regarded as the distinctive features of Philistine culture, indeed, did disappear. As the archaeological evidence piled up, however, it became clear that the Philistines continued to exist, although they had adopted features of other cultures. However—and this is the important point—they also retained their ethnic identity as Philistines, only to be obliterated in the path of the Babylonian assaults of the late seventh century and early sixth century B.C.E. Those assaults also destroyed Jerusalem, burned the Temple and put an end to the state of Judah and the 400-year dynasty founded by King David.

Between about 1000 B.C.E. and the late seventh century B.C.E., the Philistines survived and sometimes thrived, absorbing cultural characteristics of their neighbors—the Israelites, the Phoenicians and, finally, the Assyrians.

To understand this process of Philistine survival and acculturation, we need to look at the broader context of what was happening to the various peoples from whom the Philistines absorbed cultural characteristics.

Let’s start with the Canaanites. Extensive excavations in present-day Israel, Jordan, southern Lebanon and Syria have demonstrated that the Canaanites dominated Syria-Palestine during the third and second millennia B.C.E. As they became urbanized, the Canaanites built the great Bronze Age fortified city-states of Acco, Ashkelon, Dan, Dor, Gezer, Hazor, Lachish, Jericho and Megiddo.⁴ During the first quarter of the 12th century B.C.E., however, a major crisis erupted in the eastern Mediterranean basin, bringing to an abrupt end the Bronze Age Canaanite civilization. The Sea Peoples, who included the Philistines, attacked the coastal areas of Canaan, the land of the Hittites (modern Turkey) and Egypt, leaving complete destruction in their wake.⁵ This marked the transition from the well-developed Late Bronze Age Aegean palace economies, with their centralized politico-economic orders, to the more provincial state-oriented, decentralized economic system of the Iron Age nation-states, including Philistia, Phoenicia and Israel.⁶

In the aftermath of this upheaval, many of the Canaanites were simply absorbed into the emerging Philistine and Israelite settlements and cities. Around 1000 B.C.E., however, the remnants of the Canaanites in the coastal plain of what is now northern Israel and Lebanon controlled a number of port cities, including Tyre and Sidon. In the course of time, these Canaanites became known as Phoenicians, which means “purple-dye people,” because they were the major producer of purple dye, made from tiny murex shells.⁷ Thus the Phoenicians became the ethnic and cultural successors of the Canaanites.⁸

In the next few hundred years, the Phoenicians began the westward expansion of an international commercial empire that was to last for almost a thousand years. In the process of establishing trading centers, 043cities and colonies across the Mediterranean, the Phoenicians introduced much of the then-known world to the alphabet, one of the most revolutionary of human inventions.⁹

At about the same time, another major event occurred in the ancient Near East that was to have a profound impact on western civilization—the establishment of the nation-state of ancient Israel, formed out of a 044loose confederation of 12 Hebrew tribes.¹⁰ This new Israelite nation would become the vehicle for advancing monotheism and for producing one of the world’s most influential and enduring religious and literary works, the Hebrew Bible.

The presence of the Israelites is attested in the land of Canaan as early as the 13th century B.C.E. In the famous hieroglyphic stela of Pharaoh Merneptah, the term for the “the people of Israel” appears hundreds of years before Israel became a nation-state.¹¹ Although questions of where the Israelites came from and how they came to settle in the land of Canaan still generate considerable discussion, the archaeological record of the 12th and 11th centuries is unambiguous. It documents the presence of a large population in the previously unsettled highlands of Judah and Ephraim.¹² These new settlers are considered the early Israelites, and their land comprised most of what would become the land of Biblical Israel two centuries later.¹³

As we shall see, both the Israelites and the Phoenicians had a profound effect on their neighbors, the Philistines.

The Philistines were one of the Aegean tribes of Sea Peoples (the Shardana and Tjeker were others), who landed on the coast of what is now Israel (as we know from Egyptian references). While the Philistines settled on the southern coast of Israel, other Sea Peoples settled further north. For more than two hundred years, from the 12th through the 11th centuries B.C.E., the Philistine pentapolis—Ashdod, Ashkelon, Ekron, Gath and Gaza—constituted a major political and economic power threatening the very existence of the Israelite tribes.¹⁴

The Philistines are portrayed in the Bible as Israel’s chief antagonist, so it is perhaps understandable that their name has become a pejorative epithet for a boorish and uncultured lout. This negative connotation is now changing, however, and the assumption of some scholars that the Philistines were mere pirates who plundered and destroyed is crumbling. In fact, the Philistines built great urban centers on the Canaanite cities they destroyed and developed a distinctive material culture of their own that reflects a highly sophisticated society. Their unique material culture includes architecture, ceramics and cultic artifacts, made with the advanced technology of their times and recalling their Aegean predecessors.¹⁵

One example of advanced metallurgic technology is an iron knife found at Ekron with an ivory handle and bronze rivets.¹⁶ According to the Bible, the Israelites had to come to the Philistines to get their iron tools repaired and sharpened (1 Samuel 13:19–22).^a

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When the Philistines arrived at Tel Miqne (later called Ekron) in about 1175 B.C.E., they found only a small, unwalled Canaanite settlement on the 10-acre acropolis of the upper tell (Stratum VIII). This the Philistines destroyed. In the remains of what previously had been Caananite storage buildings, we found destroyed jars filled with wheat and barley seeds. One jar was filled to the brim with figs.¹⁷

The Philistines rebuilt the acropolis, as well as the long-abandoned lower tell (which had been destroyed at the end of the Middle Bronze Age, in the 16th century B.C.E.). The result was a 50-acre Philistine urban center with massive fortifications, an industrial zone for pottery production and monumental buildings with cultic areas (Strata VII-IV). Ekron, like other Philistine cities—for example, Ashdod—prospered until around 1000 B.C.E., when it was destroyed, perhaps by the Egyptian pharaoh Siamon or as a result of its continuing conflict with Israel.^b

What then happened to the Philistines? According to scholarly speculation, they were overwhelmed by, and eventually assimilated into, the major population groups of Israelites or Phoenicians.¹⁸ It is true that distinctive Philistine cultural markers—architectural and artifact traditions that the Philistines had brought with them from their Aegean homeland—disappeared. After about 1000 B.C.E., for example, distinctive Philistine anthropomorphic figurines, like the famous Ashdoda are absent from the archaeological record. Similarly, both Philistine monochrome pottery, decorated with bands and elaborate designs, and the bichrome pottery with spiral and bird designs (see photo) that superseded it, also disappear. Nor do we find the monumental so-called megaron-type architecture, with a long central hall, often with a hearth and side rooms and an entrance from a porch flanked by pillars or pilasters. Some scholars simply assumed that as these distinctive Philistine cultural markers disappeared, so had the Philistines.¹⁹ We now know otherwise.

After the tenth-century B.C.E destruction of Ekron (either by the Egyptians or the Israelites), the lower city was abandoned. Whatever was left of the Philistine population withdrew to the upper tell. For the following 250 years (Strata III-II), Philistine Ekron remained a small, fortified town, and its alternating independent or semi-independent status depended on its relations with Judah and other local nation-states.

Already in the 11th century B.C.E., we see the Philistine pottery traditions beginning to incorporate Canaanite and Cypriote decorative patterns. By the tenth century B.C.E., Phoenician-style architecture appears at Ekron—the ashlar header-and-stretcher construction typical of the Phoenicians is used as facing for a 15-foot-thick mud brick tower attached to 046the new tenth-century city wall. In this construction technique, rectangular well-dressed stones were laid alternately with the short side (the header) next to the long side (the stretcher), thus strengthening the mud brick tower and protecting it from the elements.

In the years that followed (the ninth and eighth centuries B.C.E.), Phoenician and Judahite pottery forms also appear, indicating Ekron’s contact with two of its nation-state neighbors.²⁰

The logical question at this point is, How do we know that the people of Ekron continued to identify themselves as Philistine?

One reason is that some of the Philistine pottery traditions from the end of the 11th century B.C.E. continued into later centuries, as part of a distinctive Philistine Coastal Plain ceramic tradition. This corpus is best represented in its final development in the large repertoire of pottery in the seventh century B.C.E.

At this time, the lower city of Ekron was again settled as the site grew from 10 to almost 85 acres, with enough space to accommodate 6,000 people (Strata IC-IB). This regeneration and expansion was the result of Ekron’s newly established olive oil industrial center, the largest of its kind in antiquity yet discovered. Consequently, Ekron became one of the largest Biblical-period cities, and an international commercial power, achieving the zenith of its economic and physical growth under Assyrian hegemony.^c

The Assyrians—or more precisely the Neo-Assyrians, the term used to distinguish them from the Assyrians of earlier empires of the third and second millennia B.C.E.—are best remembered by students of the Bible as the people who conquered the northern 047state of Israel in 721 B.C.E., bringing it to an end.^d The people of the northern state disappeared from history, never to be heard from again. They are known as the Ten Lost Tribes of Israel. Only the southern state of Judah survived, although it was occasionally brought to its knees by the likes of the Assyrian monarchs Tiglath-pileser III (744–727 B.C.E.), Sargon II (721–705 B.C.E.) and Sennacherib (704–681 B.C.E.).

It was not long, however, before the Neo-Assyrians got their comeuppance: In 609 B.C.E., Babylonia replaced Assyria as the world’s superpower. But in the one hundred years known as the pax Assyriaca (721–627 B.C.E.), when Assyria ruled the world, and later, until almost the end of the seventh century, when Egypt was the major influence in Philistia, Ekron prospered. And it is from these periods that we derive much of the evidence for the continuance of a thoroughly acculturated, hybrid Philistine culture.²¹

Neo-Assyrian texts provide detailed evidence of the vassal relationship of the Philistine city-states, as well as the survival of Philistine ethnicity. In referring to Assyria’s relations with Palaštu (Philistia), these texts mention its city-states of Amqarrûna (Ekron), Asdûdu (Ashdod), Hâzat (Gaza) and Isqalûna (Ashkelon). They also refer to te-ne-šit … Pi-lis-ti ù (the people of 048Philistia). Thus the Philistines, albeit greatly acculturated, as shown by the archaeological evidence, were still recognized as a distinct ethnic group with their own land and cities.²²

But there is more.

Two potsherds from a store jar from our excavation inscribed qdš l’šrt (see photos), that is, “dedicated to Asherat,” tell us that the West Semitic Canaanite goddess Asherat was worshiped at Ekron. Moreover, the spelling of the goddess’s name and the way in which the letters were formed are Phoenician, another example of cultic adaptation by the Ekronites.

The word lmkm appears in another Ekron store jar inscription (see photo). In Phoenician and occasionally in Biblical Hebrew, this means “for the shrine.” This store jar also bears the Phoenician sign of a tet, a cross within a circle, signifying tevel, or produce set aside for tithing. Under the sign are three horizontal lines, representing 30 units in the Phoenician numbering system. This, like the other inscriptions, reflects Phoenician influence on religious practice, and indicates that there was a shrine or temple at Ekron to which offerings were brought, which in turn suggests the existence of a priesthood.²³

Temple Complex 650, where these inscriptions were found, is a monumental rectangular structure 185 feet long and 140 feet wide enclosing almost 26,000 square feet (see photo and drawing). It is one of the largest buildings ever excavated in modern-day Israel. Its architectural plan, unique to the region, is based on the design concept common to Neo-Assyrian royal palaces, residences and temples. It involves three primary components: two large 049buildings separated by a long hall. In the case of Ekron’s Temple Complex 650, the building on the east side had a large square-shaped open courtyard with a series of rooms built around it. On the west, a large building with a rectangular sanctuary was surrounded on three sides by small activity rooms. The main hall of the sanctuary had two parallel rows of four column bases and a raised cella, or Holy of Holies, at its far end.

The long hall that separated these two buildings was a narrow rectangular-shaped throne room or reception hall, with steps leading up to a raised mud brick platform or throne at its southern end. This room is the architectural feature that most clearly is similar to Neo-Assyrian-type monumental buildings. The throne room served as a buffer and a means of access between the two large buildings. On the other hand, the sanctuary reflects a clear Phoenician design, such as that of the Astarte temple at Kition on Cyprus. In contrast to these foreign influences, the round column bases in Temple 650, reused from an earlier Iron Age I cultic building, indicate a continuation of local Philistine construction traditions. Thus, Temple Complex 650 represents a hybrid of foreign architectural designs and local construction traditions, attesting to the dual processes of continuity and acculturation at Ekron.²⁴

The artifacts from the sanctuary itself provide the broadest range of evidence of Phoenician and Assyrian influences, as well as an unequivocal confirmation of Philistine cultural continuity.

In the cella, which served as the focus of the temple, we recovered the body of a female figurine with folded arms. The head was found at the entrance to the sanctuary. This figurine, with its bell-shaped body, is typical of Phoenician figurines found throughout the Mediterranean basin.²⁵

A dedicatory inscription incised on a storage jar found in the temple reads lb’l wlpdy, “for Ba’al and for Padi”. Ba’al, well-known as the chief adversary of Yahweh, the God of Israel in the Hebrew Bible, was the fertility and storm god in the Canaanite and Phoenician pantheons. Padi was a king of Ekron mentioned in the royal Assyrian annals.

The formula “for Ba’al and for Padi,” that is, “for 050god and king,” emulates Assyrian phraseology, “to revere god and king,” indicating the responsibility of a citizen to pay cultic taxes and to perform crown services. This inscription from Ekron thus represents an unparalleled example of Assyrian cultural influence on the linguistic sphere of Philistine Ekron.²⁶

The Ekron temple also contained ivory objects from 051Egypt. One example is a large ivory tusk carved in the shape of a male figure with the relief of a princess or goddess on one side (see photo) and the cartouche of Pharaoh Merneptah on the back (a cartouche contains a royal name, usually inside an oval frame), dated to the end of the 13th century B.C.E. Another example is an ivory knob bearing the cartouche of Pharaoh Ramesses VIII, from the 12th century B.C.E. Other Egyptian-style objects found in the temple include an amulet bearing the image of Ptah-patecus, the Egyptian god of craftsmen, and a gold cobra (see photo)—a uraeus, like the ones that were part of the crown of an Egyptian ruler. Perhaps some of this was booty plundered by the Assyrians.²⁷

Finally, the pièce de résistance: an inscription from the cella of the sanctuary that provides incontrovertible proof of both the process of acculturation and of Philistine continuity. The Ekron Royal Dedicatory Inscription (see photo and drawing) was found during our final excavation season. The inscription, which is complete, contains five lines and reads:

The temple which he built, ‘kys (Achish, Ikausu) son of Padi, son of Ysd, son of Ada, son of Ya’ir, ruler of Ekron, for Ptgyh his lady. May she bless him, and protect him and prolong his days, and bless his land.

The inscription records the dedication of the sanctuary by Ikausu, son of Padi, both of whom are referred to in Assyrian documents as kings of Ekron. In royal Assyrian records, Ikausu is listed as one of the 12 coastal kings who transported building materials to Nineveh for the palace of Esarhaddon (680–669 B.C.E.). Ikausu also appears in a list of kings who participated in Ashurbanipal’s first campaign against Egypt in 667 B.C.E.²⁸

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Ikausu is the only non-Semitic name among the eighth- and seventh-century B.C.E. Philistine kings mentioned in Assyrian records. The name may be related to the word Achaean, meaning Greek, reflecting the Aegean origins of the Philistines. The fact that Padi gave this name to his son, or that his son adopted the name, reflects continued awareness of the Philistines’s Aegean ethnic origins going back hundreds of years to the beginning of Iron Age I (12th century B.C.E.) and of the continuity of Philistine culture to the seventh century B.C.E.

Aegean origins may also be indicated by the non-Semitic name of the goddess, Ptgyh, to whom the temple is dedicated. She has been associated with the sanctuary at Delphi known as Pytho, the shrine of Gaia, the Mycenaean mother-goddess.²⁹

The name Ikausu is associated with Biblical Achish, who was the Philistine king of Gath in the times of Saul and Solomon (1 Samuel 21:11–16; 1 Samuel 27–29; 1 Kings 2:39–40).³⁰

Finally, this inscription allows us to declare with certainty that Tel Miqne is actually Biblical Ekron since Ekron is mentioned in a monumental inscription with a list of its kings found in situ in a sealed context. Ekron is the only Biblical site to date that has been confirmed in this way.

As we have seen, two of the kings mentioned in the inscription, Padi and his son Ikausu, are also documented as kings of Ekron in the extra-Biblical royal Assyrian annals of Sennacherib, Esarhaddon and Ashurbanipal, whose dates are well fixed. On this basis, the Ekron rulers in the inscription from Ya’ir to Ikausu suggests a dynastic period that probably lasted from the eighth through most of the first half of the seventh century B.C.E. Within this period, an Assyrian text tells us that after Sennacherib destroyed most of the cities in Judah in 701 B.C.E., he gave the towns of the defeated Judahite King Hezekiah to Padi and others.³¹ This would then provide the rationale for a date of about 700 B.C.E. for the beginning of the expansion of Ekron as an Assyrian vassal city-state. This is consistent with our stratigraphic data reflecting Ekron’s becoming an olive oil industrial production center. This well-designed city, with its four zones of occupation—fortifications, industrial, domestic and elite—must have been built over a period of years during the first quarter of the seventh century B.C.E.³²

As an Assyrian vassal city-state in the first quarter of the seventh century B.C.E., Ekron became the largest olive-oil production center that we know of from antiquity (see photo and drawings). The 115 olive oil installations found thus far at Ekron from the 053Neo-Assyrian period dwarf the number of such installations at nearby sites—for example, seven at Gezer, 12 at Beth Shemesh and six at Tell Beit Mirsim.³³

The prosperity of Ekron at this time is seen in some silver hoards from what we call the Temple Auxiliary Complex. Two of these hoards contained 19 silver ingots and 66 pieces of cut silver, showing the use of silver as a means of exchange, an early form of money. The use of silver as the standard currency not only facilitated international trade, but allowed the efficient Assyrian bureaucracy to collect taxes from the far-flung corners of the vast Assyrian empire.³⁴

There is no evidence that olive oil had been produced at Ekron prior to the seventh century B.C.E., indicating that the industrial know-how had to be 054imported. The most obvious source was Ekron’s neighbor Judah, where the technology for producing olive oil had been well known for centuries. As we have come to expect, Ekron Philistines absorbed their olive-oil production expertise from their neighbor but adapted it to their own methods, thereby developing a new economic culture.

Each olive-oil factory at Ekron included three connected rooms. Generally, the back room contained an installation composed of a large stone basin flanked on 055each side by a stone press. The olives were first crushed in the basin with a stone roller, producing the first—and finest—oil. Straw baskets were then filled with the pulp that remained in the crushing basin and the baskets were stacked on top of the presses. A wooden lever secured at one end in a niche in the back wall of the room and weighted down at its other end with four 200-pound stone weights was used to press the pulp. The oily substance that was produced was scooped up from the sump of the presses and poured into large storage jars that were then left standing in the middle room, allowing the oil and water to separate.

We estimate that between 500 and 1,000 tons of oil were produced at Ekron annually. And this is based only on the 115 olive oil installations found thus far; only four percent of the site has been excavated. So we can say with considerable confidence that Ekron’s mass production of olive oil was primarily for export. The oil was most probably sent westward to Egypt and other parts of North Africa.

Of the thousands of restorable and whole vessels, and tens of thousands of diagnostic potsherds we excavated at the site, 83 percent were in the tradition of the Philistine coastal plain, with the remainder divided between southern Judahite and imported forms; this is more evidence of both cultural continuity and absorption from outside.³⁵

One of the more surprising artifacts found in the olive-oil factories, as well as in buildings in other occupation zones, were four-horned incense altars. Seventeen were excavated at Ekron, representing more than half of all such altars found in Israel, Judah and Philistia. These altars were probably fashioned at Ekron by craftsmen who came (or were brought there by the Assyrians) from the northern kingdom of Israel, where these altars had been made for centuries.

The altars are significant for two reasons. First, since they were found in every zone of occupation, it can be assumed that whatever cultic practice the altars involved, such as the burning of incense, could be performed at home, in the factory or in public areas, thus creating a decentralized worship system. This is in stark contrast to the centralized system indicated by the storejar inscribed lmkm, “for the shrine,” and by the sanctuary in Temple Complex 650 and its dedicatory inscription. It is possible to understand all this as part of a dual worship system: first as an element of the 056continuity of centralized temple service harking back to the Philistine temple to the god Dagon in Ashdod in an earlier period (1 Samuel 5); second, as an example of acculturation, that is, a reflex of the decentralized folk-religious tradition that was apparent in the contemporary Judahite worship system as indicated by the “mak[ing of] offerings to the Queen of Heaven and … pour[ing] libations to her … in the towns of Judah and the streets of Jerusalem” (Jeremiah 44:17).³⁶

Since these altars were not part of an earlier local Philistine tradition but were adopted in the seventh century B.C.E. as an important element of Philistine cultic or religious practice, they provide an example of the impact of Israelite religious practice and of the process of Philistine religious acculturation.

Some time during the last third of the seventh century B.C.E., the Assyrians retreated to their homeland to defend themselves against the onslaught of the Babylonians. Philistia then fell under Egyptian influence, and olive-oil production at Ekron declined.³⁷ This marked the beginning of the final chapter in the history of Philistine Ekron, which ended in 604 B.C.E. As documented by the Babylonian Chronicles, when the Babylonians, under Nebuchadnezzar—the same Babylonian leader who destroyed Jerusalem and brought an end to the kingdom of Judah in 586 B.C.E—in the course of preparing to conquer Egypt, burned the Egyptian-allied cities of Philistia to the ground.³⁸ Even a last-minute appeal by the last king of Ekron, Adon, to his patron, the Pharaoh of Egypt, which is documented in an Aramaic papyrus, could not save Ekron.³⁹ The population of Ekron, the great seventh-century B.C.E. industrial center, was apparently carried off into Babylonian captivity, as were the inhabitants of the other destroyed Philistine cities—as would be, only a few years later, the inhabitants of Judah.

So overwhelming were the cumulative effects of the trauma of being uprooted from their homeland, and of the long process of acculturation, which was greatly accelerated during the Assyrian control of Philistia, that by the time of the Babylonian conquest, the Ekronites no longer had a sufficiently strong core culture to maintain themselves in exile. Thus, after a long period in captivity, they eventually disappeared from the pages of history.

For a technical version of this article, see Seymour Gitin, “The Philistines: Neighbors of the Canaanites, Phoenicians and Israelites,” in D.R. Clark and V.H. Matthews, eds., 100 Years of Archaeology in the Middle East (Boston: American Schools of Oriental Research, 2004), pp. 57–85.

The Philistines were the chief adversary of Biblical Israel in the 12th and 11th centuries B.C.E. They were also the conquerors of the Canaanite cities of the southern coastal plain.1 At the beginning of the first millennium B.C.E., however, the Philistine cities were destroyed and the Philistines themselves seem to have become a casualty of history, as they apparently disappeared from the archaeological and historical record. This was the conclusion of most historians and archaeologists—until we began to excavate the Philistine site of Tel Miqne (Biblical Ekron), on the border of the Israelite hill country, 22 miles southwest […]