And Abraham sojourned in the Philistines' land many days.
Genesis 21:34
"A huge Philistine cemetery some 3000-years-old has been found in the Mediterranean seaport of Ashkelon. The manner of the burials proves, for the first time, that the Philistines had to have come from the Aegean Sea region, and that they had very close ties with the Phoenician world.
“Ninety-nine percent of the chapters and articles written about Philistine burial customs should be revised or ignored now that we have the first and only Philistine cemetery,” says Lawrence E. Stager, Dorot Professor of the Archaeology of Israel, Emeritus, at Harvard University.
The cemetery was found just outside the city walls of Tel Ashkelon, one of the Philistines' five primary cities in ancient Israel.
The cemetery was found to have more then 150 individual burials dating from the 11th to 8th century BC. The undisturbed graves have shed fresh light on a mystery bedeviling archaeologists for decades: the Philistines' real origins.
How the Philistines lived: Not like Canaanites
The unprecedented discovery of the Philistine cemetery allows the archaeologists not only to study Philistine burial practices for the first time, but also to gain insights on Philistine characteristics and lifestyle. With this discovery, the archaeologists finally have a data set not on one or two individuals but a whole population, explains Daniel M. Master, professor of Wheaton College and co-director of the Leon Levy Expedition. That in turn will enable them to talk about what’s typical and what’s not typical, he explains.
“This forms a baseline for what 'Philistine' is. We can already say that the cultural practices we see here are substantially different from the Canaanites and the highlanders in the east," Master says.
The bodies can also provide information about Philistine dietary habits, lifestyle and morbidity.
One conclusion the archaeologists have already reached is that these particular individuals seemed to
have been spared from strife.
“There is no evidence of any kind of trauma on the bones, from war on inter-personal violence,” Fox told Haaretz.
Unlike the typical burial practice in the region - family burials or multiple burials, where the deceased were laid on raised platforms or benches - the practice in Ashkelon was markedly different.
The deceased were, for the most part, buried in oval pits. Four out of the 150 were cremated and some other bodies were deposited in ashlar burial chamber tombs. These are burial practices well known from the Aegean cultural sphere - but certainly not from the Canaanite one.
In other instances, small vials that had contained perfume were found next to the deceased (probably an olive oil based with different fragrances) . In two cases the bottle was found at the nostril, pointing to the nose, presumably so that the deceased could smell perfume throughout eternity.
In addition to the 150 individual pit graves found at the cemetery, six burial chambers with multiple bodies were found (when the bodies were found at all). A magnificent rectangular burial chamber was discovered inside the cemetery, built with perfectly hewn sandstones. But the large stone door that once stood at its entrance evidently could not hinder grave robbers from looting the tomb of its treasure and its occupants' skeletal remains.
When the chamber was built and used is anybody’s guess. “The latest pottery is trash from the 7th century BC, but the chamber might have been built and used somewhat earlier,” Master told Haaretz.
One of the earliest references to the Philistines is Ramesses III´s mortuary relief at Medinet Habu. The relief portrays the Battle of the Delta, the grand struggle between the Egyptians and the Sea
Peoples that took place at the mouth of the Nile during the early 12th century BC (1176-75 BC).
Stager suspects the Philistines had to have been well entrenched in south Canaan before the Battle of the Delta. Ashkelon would have been one of the first strategic points the Philistines would have settled, securing as sort of “bridgehead”, before they launched their armada and infantry against the Egyptians in the Nile Delta.
“Ramesses III tried to contain them in their five Philistine cities, but obviously he could not control them or drive them out," says Stager.
Daniel Master differs: “I think Egypt was still in control of the region, even Philistia, and that the Philistines settled with Egyptian acquiescence. This is become a broader consensus over the last few years due to work at Megiddo, Jaffa, and Ashkelon itself, where we find many Egyptian objects from this period,” he told Haaretz.
At this point, we do not know if the Egyptians managed to subdue the Philistines. But we do know that the Philistines did eventually have their comeuppance.
In early December 604 BC, the Babylonians swept through Philistia, destroying the cities and exiling its inhabitants. The Babylonian ruler Nebuchadnezzar torched Philistia in early December 604 BC, yet within the massive destruction, architecture, ceramics and even foods remained, providing the archaeologists with a snapshot of life in a Philistine city during the 7th century BC."
Haaretz