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The Philistines apparently loved their pork—much more than the Canaanites who lived in the region before the Philistine arrival around 1200 B.C.E. Excavations at Ashkelon and Ekron, two cities of the Philistine pentapolis, have shed new light on the dietary staples of this enigmatic people. In the strata of the Canaanite habitation that preceded the first Philistine settlements, only 5 percent of the bones found were pig bones. With the arrival of the Philistines, the figure jumped to 20 percent.
These findings provide still more evidence of where the Philistines originally came from: the Aegean. Besides the presence of Philistine pottery that resembles Greek Mycenaean pottery and Mycenaean architectural continuities in Philistine structures, there is now the dietary similarity. At Mycenaean sites in the Aegean, approximately 30 percent of the bones discovered in excavations are pig bones.
The Philistines evidently also ate dog meat. None of their Canaanite neighbors ever appear to have done that, but dog bones from Ashkelon showed butchering marks on them, indicating that the flesh had been prepared for consumption.
The Leon Levy Expedition to Ashkelon is led by Professor Lawrence Stager of Harvard University, and the zooarchaeologists are Professors Brian Hesse and Paula Wapnish Hesse of Penn State University. The excavation at Ekron is led by Professor Trude Dothan of Hebrew University and Professor Seymour Gitin, director of the W.F. Albright Institute of Archaeological Research in Jerusalem.
The Philistines apparently loved their pork—much more than the Canaanites who lived in the region before the Philistine arrival around 1200 B.C.E. Excavations at Ashkelon and Ekron, two cities of the Philistine pentapolis, have shed new light on the dietary staples of this enigmatic people. In the strata of the Canaanite habitation that preceded the first Philistine settlements, only 5 percent of the bones found were pig bones. With the arrival of the Philistines, the figure jumped to 20 percent.
