Endnote 23 – When Canaanites and Philistines Ruled Ashkelon

See John A. Wilson, ANET, p. 28, for Wen-Amon, where Dor is called a “town of the Tjeker (=Sikil).” Recently Dr. Avner Raban, of the Center for Maritime Studies at Haifa University, has discovered the remains of the ancient harbor used by Wen-Amon in the 11th century B.C. at Dor (see Raban, “The Harbor of the Sea Peoples at Dor,” Biblical Archaeologist 50 (1987), pp. 118–126.) The terrestrial archaeologist at Dor, Professor Ephraim Stern, considers the fortification system with glacis to have been built initially by the Sea Peoples, and specifically by the Sikils (personal communication). Shortly before the fall of Ugarit at the hands of the Sea Peoples, the Sikalayu, “who live on ships,” were raiding and kidnapping along the coast, according to one Akkadian letter found at Ugarit (RS 34.129). Among the last tablets written there the last king of Ugarit despairs, saying: “The enemy ships are already here, they have set fire to my towns and have done very great damage in the country” (RS 20.238). These seafarers and pirates (the Sikalayu = “Sikils”) later moved down the coast and settled in the region of Dor.

Several scholars misidentified the Sikalayu with the Sea Peoples group known as Shekelesh (e.g. G.A. Lehmann, “Die Sikalayu—ein neues Zeugnis zu den ‘seevolker’—Heerfahrten im spaten 13 Jh. V. Chr. [RS 34. 129],” Ugarit Forschung 11 [1979], pp. 481–494).

Anson Rainey was the first scholar to identify correctly the Tjeker of Egyptian sources with the Sikalayu of Ugarit. The tj of Tjeker should be phoneticized s (samakh); and of course, Egyptian r can equal r or l in Semitic. The gentilic Sikalayu actually masks the ethnicon Sikil (see Rainey, “Toponymic Problems,” Tel Aviv 9 [1982], p. 134; for the best interpretation of the text, see Gregory Mobley, “The Identity of the Sikalayu [RS 34.129],” BASOR [forthcoming]).

Thus the Sea Peoples, who established themselves at Dor in the early 12th century B.C.—namely, the Sikils—closely resemble the Sikelor of later Greek sources, the people who gave their name to Sicily, just as the Sherden, another group of Sea Peoples, bequeathed their name to Sardinia, and the Teresh/Tursha to first Tarsus and later to the Etruscans of Italy. According to the dispersal of proper names and the evidence of immigrant Mycenaeans, it would appear that during the “colonization” of the coastal Levant and Cyprus, fissiparous groups of Sea Peoples bearing the same ethnicons settled the coastal regions of the central Mediterranean and bequeathed their names to several peoples and places there.