Piece by Piece: Exploring the Origins of the Philistines

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Who were the Philistines? For centuries, the answer seemed clear: The Philistines were ancient people from the Bible, villains fighting against God’s people. Every Philistine success was lamented, every defeat celebrated in a classic clash between the forces of light and darkness. No one cheered for Goliath’s military prowess or applauded Delilah’s seduction.

But what was the origin of these ancient villains? The Table of Nations in Genesis 10 seems to connect the Philistines with the Egyptians (Genesis 10:13-14). Other texts in Deuteronomy, Amos, and Jeremiah place them in Caphtor, leading some to speculate that Caphtor was in the Egyptian Delta. According to this hypothesis, the Philistines must have arrived some time before the era of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob.

Building on the discoveries of the past 200 years,^a we are not reliant solely on the Bible to formulate our conclusions. Egyptian, Assyrian, and Babylonian texts all speak of the Philistines. Archaeologists have now excavated four of the five major Philistine cities listed in the Hebrew Bible (Ashkelon, Ashdod, Ekron, and Gath). More recently, geneticists have sequenced Iron Age genomes from the city of Ashkelon, providing dramatic new insights into Philistine origins. All these sources clarify the Philistine story.

As soon as hieroglyphs were deciphered in the 19th century, references to “Peleset” were observed in ancient Egyptian texts. The Peleset were immediately connected to the Philistines, an equation still considered valid today. Because the Egyptian New Kingdom had dominated the land of Canaan in the preceding centuries, Egyptian records would likely have mentioned any Philistines even tangentially involved in the southern Levant. So when they suddenly appear in the 12th-century inscriptions from the walls of Ramesses III’s temple at Medinet Habu, we have a good indication of when they first arrived in the region. In the Egyptian texts, the Peleset appear as part of a confederation of peoples from the “islands” who wreaked havoc across the eastern Mediterranean and finally attacked Egypt itself.

Even with the Egyptian clues, many questions remained: The Egyptian texts noted that these peoples came from “islands” but did not specify which islands. Further, it was not clear if all of the groups linked with the Peleset came from the same region: Did they start out together, or did new groups join them during their travels?

In the 19th century, scholars called the Peleset and their coconspirators “Sea Peoples,” connecting them with the myths of Homer. The movements of Sea Peoples noted in the Egyptian texts seem to echo tales of Odysseus and Aeneas. In addition, the classical legend of Mopsus, a survivor of the Trojan War, recalled his leading people through Cilicia, ultimately arriving with a group at Ashkelon. The mention of the Philistines in such contexts led scholars to wonder if the Philistines of the Bible could be connected to classical legends, although any speculative connections with the heroes (or villains) at Troy remained shrouded in the same uncertainty as the rest of Homer’s world—with no clear basis in the history of the second millennium B.C.E.

Such an incomplete story opened the way for archaeologists to fill in the gaps. Early 20th-century excavators in the southern Levant (first under the Ottoman empire, then under the British Mandate) focused their attention on the 12th century B.C.E., based on the date of the Egyptian texts. At just this chronological horizon, they discovered locally made pots with decorations that reminded them of patterns from the Bronze Age Aegean.¹ Archaeologists saw the ceramics as key to demonstrating that a new people had moved into the region from the Aegean as mentioned in Egyptian texts. The picture was becoming clearer.

In the late 20th century, archaeologists turned to the cities that the Bible lists as “Philistine,” with modern excavations at Ashdod, Ashkelon, Ekron, and finally Tell es-Safi/Gath (Gaza remaining unexplored).^b Each excavation team made similar discoveries. In the 12th century B.C.E., at all of these sites, new ideas about architecture, family, food, and art appeared suddenly and broadly. The patterns were only rarely found elsewhere in the southern Levant, but they could be connected to the west, either to Cyprus or to the Mycenaean archaeological culture encompassing mainland Greece, Crete, and the western coast of Turkey.

But patterns of objects can never tell the whole story of a people. Even today, if we reflect on the clothes we wear or the daily objects we use, we must admit that the place of their manufacture—and even the details of their style—do not always reflect our own location or background. Much is traded; much is imported. The same was true in the ancient world. It is up to archaeologists to determine whether the objects found in the excavation trench are characteristic of a particular group or simply imports from another region.

In 1995, Lawrence Stager, the late director of the Leon Levy Expedition to Ashkelon, tried to address this specific difficulty by building a checklist to determine whether there was enough evidence in the region of Philistine occupation to show an actual migration, as opposed to internal developments or trade. He argued that the material culture in Philistia was distinct from its surroundings and linked to earlier cultural patterns in the Aegean. There was a plausible route that linked the two areas. As a result, Stager supported the long-held idea of an Aegean migration in the 12th century. Other archaeologists agreed, arguing that when the cultural change is wide and deep enough, when it touches the very patterns of hearth and home, it can be considered a “deep change” and can therefore be linked to migration.²

Yet, as much as archaeologists were tempted to infer that this group had migrated based on the objects that they used, the conclusion was still indirect. While some things changed in Philistine cities, many cultural features stayed the same. Did this mean that only a few people migrated? Additionally, some Philistine objects were rare in the Aegean but common in Cyprus. Did this hint that Cyprus played a more important role? It was difficult to weigh the evidence amid the uncertainties.

One set of scholars even argued that the whole trajectory was off target. They asked whether the interpretation of texts, both Egyptian and biblical, had biased archaeologists so much that a few trinkets were privileged, while the mass of local material was ignored. Some revisited the basic Egyptian texts that started it all, placing the battles in the days of Ramesses III farther north, at the margins of the Egyptian empire. A few years ago, texts found in southeastern Turkey that referred to “Walastin” or “Palastin” prompted the idea that this was the location of the Philistines in the 12th and 11th centuries. Some scholars went so far as to argue that there was no evidence for associating early Iron Age material from the southern Levant with the Philistines.³

Beginning in 2013, however, the first direct evidence for the origin of the inhabitants of Philistia in the 12th and 11th centuries emerged. The Leon Levy Expedition to Ashkelon, in concert with the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History, launched a program to chart the genetic profiles of the ancient Bronze and Iron Age inhabitants of the city.⁴ (By then I had joined Lawrence Stager as a director of excavations at Ashkelon.) Rather than examining ancient texts, perhaps written much later and having an agenda of their own, or looking at ancient artifacts that provide only indirect evidence, this project sought to look at the genetic material of the inhabitants themselves.

The first part of this genetic research examined people who lived at Ashkelon during the middle of the second millennium. These individuals were buried in typical multigenerational family tombs of the Bronze Age. Each of the Bronze Age individuals from Ashkelon contained genetic material similar to groups that lived up and down the coast of the Levant in the Bronze Age, similar to the inhabitants of Sidon and Megiddo. These were “local” groups of the Late Bronze and Iron Ages, and they provided a baseline for understanding the 12th century at Ashkelon.

In the late 12th century, just when the material culture changed and the Egyptian texts suggest migration, the inhabitants of Ashkelon buried infants in shallow graves under the floors of their houses. Our excavations uncovered eight of these rare burials. It is extremely unusual to find any human remains from 12th-century Philistia. These infants were too young to have traveled, and their interment burial beneath houses is a mark of the permanent settlement of their families in the homes above.

In the first round of testing, the genetic sequence of one of these infants was very different from that of Ashkelon’s Bronze Age inhabitants. The infant’s ancestors had come from somewhere else. In fact, this infant showed genetic characteristics of “Western European Hunter-Gatherers.” This name is shorthand for a Stone Age population that lived in Europe long ago and never left. These genetic anomalies can be found in many European populations, though it is not something as specific as Spanish, French, or German would be in modern Europe. It is a much broader marker, noted in varying degrees in populations from Crete to the British Isles.

Here, for the first—and really only—time in the Bronze or Iron Age world, this geographically foreign genetic material appeared in families in Ashkelon. When all the genetic material was taken into account (not just the small Western European Hunter-Gatherer component), no place was a better match for the genetic material found than Crete—though places farther west also produced good, possible matches. This result was so interesting that it needed further confirmation. After looking at all the infants, three additional individuals from Ashkelon, all infants buried beneath houses, still had enough preserved genetic material for analysis. The results in each case showed the same nonlocal genetic heritage, but, interestingly, none of the four individuals was closely related to the other. This was not just one new family; this was a decidedly new population.

For researchers, this definitive evidence established a 12th-century migration. These tests showed that a significant number of the Iron Age I inhabitants of Ashkelon came from somewhere else. Even though 100 percent of the infants with preserved DNA showed some of this ancestry, this does not mean that Ashkelon’s entire 12th-century population was made up of immigrants. But it does show, unequivocally, that a migration occurred. When these new data were combined with the contemporary Egyptian references that describe the Peleset, or Philistines, as part of a migrating group along with the later biblical references to Philistine Ashkelon, the origin story becomes clear: People came to Ashkelon in the 12th century and settled there, probably as part of a migration that started in Crete. These were the original Philistines of Ashkelon.

But, as soon as they arrived to inhabited Levantine cities like Ashkelon, the situation became quite complicated. Typically, human societies are divided into named groups. But there is often uncertainty around the edges of a group and ambiguity about whether a person belongs on one side or another of the social boundary. This does not detract from the importance of such groups in the social landscape. From the Iron Age texts, it appears that the Philistines were one such group, repeatedly called out by the people around them. Yet even though the name “Philistine” did not change for the entirety of the Iron Age, that does not mean that everything stayed the same. Even as social names persist, how people live—in their technology, economy, or simply taste and style—changes frequently. So it was with the Philistines.

For the first decades of their settlement, the Philistines lived in the shadow of the Egyptians. The Egyptians circumscribed their movement with a ring of fortresses, forcing them inward to live alongside the earlier inhabitants of the region. Even then, at each of the Philistine sites, a similar general pattern began to appear. Their distinctive pottery has designs or shapes that combined Aegean and local ceramic patterns into something uniquely Philistine.

With the decline of the Egyptian New Kingdom, Egypt withdrew from Canaan in the late 12th century. At that point, the breadth of regional interactions between the Philistines and others accelerated. Distinctive Philistine artifacts were taken across the region and then imitated, and more local motifs appear in the Philistine decorative repertoire. This was a dynamic process involving choices and influences at every level of society. Although archaeologists have used various bits of jargon to describe this phenomenon (hybridity, creolization, transculturalism, etc.),⁵ it was no doubt a complex cultural process that does not fit easily into our conceptual models and explanations.

Over time, though, the cultural development of the region faced a new constraint. From the middle of the 12th century, many parts of the eastern Mediterranean experienced a massive decline in trade, often considered the beginning of a “dark age.” For the inhabitants of Philistia, this meant that, in practice, the only new influences that they had in their world were regional, connected either to Egypt, to Levantine coastal cities, or to their inland neighbors. While aspects of the Aegean remained part of their heritage, their Aegean connections were never renewed with fresh cultural, linguistic, or genetic contributions from that world. As would be expected, the Philistines began to look more and more like their neighbors. The pottery lost its characteristic Aegean appearance and then even much of its distinctiveness within the region. Their linguistic differences diminished so significantly that, by the tenth century, Philistine writing used local alphabetic scripts that conveyed a Semitic language. The Philistines looked, at least to modern archaeologists, much like their neighbors.

By the middle of the Iron Age, there was virtually nothing left in the material record that was distinctive to the cities of Ashkelon, Ashdod, Ekron, and Gath—and nothing that would have been recognized as “Philistine” by those earlier migrants from the 12th century.

At Ashkelon, a third genetic study looked at the patterns visible in the Philistine cemetery, dated to the tenth and ninth centuries. While there was some evidence of the same Western European Hunter-Gatherer genetic input, for all statistical purposes, it could not be identified for certain. The best models showed that these people were descendants of both the 12th-century inhabitants and the earlier Bronze Age inhabitants. It appears from these results that so much intermarriage had taken place between the original immigrants and the people around them that the genetic makeup of Ashkelon’s inhabitants had lost its immigrant distinctiveness.

An unsophisticated reading of this evidence might lead one to argue that these people had ceased to be “real” Philistines. But popular definitions often confuse biology and ethnicity, a combination that does not reflect most ancient—or, it must be said, modern—societies. Despite rampant intermarriage, the inhabitants of Ashkelon, Ekron, Gaza, Gath, and Ashdod were still called “Philistines” by the Assyrians, Babylonians, and biblical writers throughout the rest of the Iron Age. This is a critical witness to the survival of the Philistines as a distinct group. The genetic tests reveal that their ongoing social self-definition did not revolve around a particular inherited, biological characteristic. Something else must have been key to their identity in their eyes and in the eyes of others.

Toward the end of Philistine history, the biblical prophets Amos and Jeremiah both share an interesting observation about the Philistines of their day. Amos’s oracle sees the divine hand in earlier events: “Didn’t I bring up Israel from the land of Egypt, and the Philistines from Caphtor, and Aram from Kir?” (Amos 9:7, author’s translation). In Amos’s telling, all three groups were immigrants to the region.

The Philistine reference fits together in a surprising way with research on the very idea of Caphtor itself. In Egypt, in New Kingdom tombs, a group called the Kephtiu was pictured with dress and objects that seem to connect to the Minoan archaeological culture, centered in Crete and its vicinity. An inscription on the base of a statue at Kom el-Hetan similarly seemed to connect Kephtiu with an itinerary of named cities from this part of the Aegean. So, quite apart from the study of the Philistines, scholars linked Kephtiu and Caphtor to Crete.⁶ Of course, this identification is based on Egyptian perceptions in the 15th and 14th centuries, and Amos is writing in the eighth century, when the term is a rarely used archaism.

As we have seen, Crete is one of the closest matches to the genetic heritage of the Ashkelon individuals from the 12th century, much closer than that of mainland Greece, Turkey, or any other options represented in the current database of ancient samples. But Amos was writing in the eighth century, past the time where that genetic material can be meaningfully identified in the Philistine genome and past the time when Caphtor was a common term. Amos’s connection between the Philistines and Caphtor is not something that could have been derived de novo in the eighth century, even with the most advanced tools in our modern toolkit. Indeed, if archaeologists and geneticists had not been able to sequence genomes from that sliver of time in the 12th and 11th centuries, no one would have caught this at all.

Jeremiah, writing more than a century after Amos, says something similar: “The Lord is about to devastate the Philistines, remnant of the Island of Caphtor. Baldness has come upon Gaza; Ashkelon is destroyed” (Jeremiah 47:4). Jeremiah still saw Ashkelon and Gaza (and Ekron) as distinctively Philistine cities, and Jeremiah draws again on the idea that this group was connected to Caphtor. In this case, Jeremiah rephrased the concept. The “remnant of Caphtor” is not primarily a description of a place from which they came; it is a way of identifying the peoples themselves.

There is no reason to suggest that this connection to Caphtor was particularly important or meaningful to Amos or Jeremiah; it hardly mattered to them from where the Philistines came. Yet someone was carefully remembering this information. An important late Philistine inscription from Ekron helps us to see the rest of the story. In a famous seventh-century text found at the site, the name of the king is Ikausu, a name also used by the king of Gath in the history of David’s rise to kingship (e.g., Achish in 1 Samuel 21:10). This name has been translated as “Achaean”—a term that, at least in the Homeric tradition, refers to the Aegean world in general.⁷

Some have tried to link this foreign name to the influence of contacts with the Aegean world in the later Iron Age but, from the standpoint of archaeology, this is a mirage. At the Philistine sites, even at the port of Ashkelon, there is a huge gap in the evidence for connections between the Aegean world and Philistia extending from the beginning of the “dark ages” in the middle of the 12th century through the very end of the seventh century. From the archaeological record, it appears that substantive connections to the Aegean only resume several decades after the Ekron text was inscribed.

Other scholars have been skeptical that the Iron Age peoples could remember a name or an Aegean connection for five centuries. And, no doubt, much was forgotten over the centuries. But now, with the genetic results from 12th-century Ashkelon paired with the texts of Amos and Jeremiah from the end of the Iron Age, it is certain that someone could and did accurately remember at least one key aspect of Philistine history—their origin.

As continued use of the name Ikausu suggests, the Philistines were proud of their origin, and, I would argue, they remembered the name Caphtor as well. Despite all the cultural and political changes and despite intermarriage, their shared memory retained this idea. The self-image of the eighth- and seventh-century Philistines was still rooted in a long-distant, but very real, immigrant experience that took place in the 12th century. Their memory of this event defined them as a social group from their beginning until their demise at the hand of the Babylonian king Nebuchadnezzar in 604 B.C.E.^c

The Philistines valued their distinctive origins, and, despite the vicissitudes of the Iron Age, their memory defined who they were. Only now, with ancient texts deciphered, ancient cities excavated, and ancient genomes decoded, can we begin to see the Philistines as they saw themselves. They were not merely the enemies of the Israelites. They were a proud immigrant people, defining themselves for almost 600 years as the “remnant of Caphtor,” heirs of the Bronze Age Aegean.

The Philistines have gone down in history as ancient Israel’s archenemy. Yet they were much more than that. We have uncovered their cities, temples, houses, weapons, tools, and pots—and, recently, remains of the Philistines themselves. Thanks to new DNA analysis, we now can answer questions about the Philistines’ origins. (Ed. note: This article contains images of human skeletal remains.)