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Philistines Upon the Seas

Author Tristan Barako defends his claim that the Philistines did indeed migrate to Canaan over water.

By Tristan Barako

In the March/April issue of BAR, two scholars, Tristan Barako and Assaf Yasur-Landau, presented contrasting arguments about how the Philistines, one of the feared Sea Peoples, left their Aegean homelands and came to settle on the coastal plain of Canaan. (“One if by Sea … Two if by Land: How Did the Philistines Get to Canaan,” BAR 29:02) The migration took place sometime after 1200 B.C., when the great palace cultures of the Mycenaean and Aegean world collapsed and when many cities in the eastern Mediterranean were destroyed. How did the Philistines get to Canaan? Barako argued on behalf […]

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Endnotes

1.

See plate I in Richard D. Barnett, “Ezekiel and Tyre,” Eretz Israel vol. 9 (1969), pp. 6–13.

2.

John Chadwick, Documents in Mycenaean Greek, second edition, (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1973), pp. 186–187, 431.

3.

For an English translation of the text (KTU 4.40) with further bibliography, see Jacob Hoftijzer and Wilfred H. van Soldt, “Texts from Ugarit Pertaining to Seafaring,” in Shelly Wachsmann, Seagoing Ships and Seamanship in the Bronze Age Levant, (College Station, TX: Texas A&M Univ. Press, 1998), p. 337.

4.

RS 34.129. See Hoftijzer and van Soldt, “Texts from Ugarit,” p. 343.

5.

This notion is based on the theory, first formulated by the German Egyptologist Rainer Stadelmann, that both the land and naval battle scenes at Medinet Habu were set in the eastern Delta; see “Die Abwehr der Seevölker unter Ramses III,” Saeculum 19.2–3 (1968), pp. 156–171.

6.

See plate 8 in Norman de G. Davies and R.O. Faulkner, “A Syrian Trading Venture to Egypt,” Journal of Egyptian Archaeology vol. 33 (1947), pp. 40–46.

7.

See plates 132–133 in Nina de Garis Davies, The Tomb of Huy, Viceroy of Nubia in the Reign of Tut’ankhamun (Theban Tomb Series, Fourth Memoir), (London: Egypt Exploration Society, 1926).

8.

For an English translation of these texts, see William L. Moran, The Amarna Letters, (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1992), pp. 105–107, 110–111.