Assaf Yasur-Landau - The Philistines and Aegean Migration at the End of the Late Bronze Age

Assaf Yasur-Landau

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In my teens, I participated, for several seasons, in the Tel Miqne/Ekron excavations, directed by Trude Dothan and Seymour Gitin. Their enthusiasm for archaeology and the amazing discoveries of the early Philistine life at the tell inevitably paved my way to archaeology and sparked my long-lasting interest in the Philistines.

The initial research for this book stemmed from my Ph.D. dissertation at Tel Aviv University. I am indebted to my advisers, Israel Finkelstein, Irad Malkin, and Shlomo Bunimovitz, for their enormous help and encouragement. Generous grants from Malcolm H. Wiener and from the Greek Ministry of Education enabled my stay in Athens for two years, which changed the course of my life.

Numerous advances in the study of the Philistines and the postpalatial Aegean world occurred during the six years that have elapsed since I completed my dissertation. These include the publication of a considerable volume of new excavation data from the entire eastern Mediterranean, which essentially required that this research be rewritten before it was published. Most of the revisions were made during my stay as a postdoctoral Fellow at the Semitic Museum of Harvard University. I am most grateful to Lawrence E. Stager, the director of the museum, for his kind hospitality and for his valuable remarks on several chapters of the book. My stay at Harvard University was supported by a Fulbright Post-Doctoral Fellowship and a grant from the Rothschild Foundation.

I am indebted to the scholars, colleagues, and friends who have read and commented on the entirety or parts of different versions of this book. Among them are Daniel Master, Stephie Nikoloudis, Krzysztof Nowicki, Jeremy Rutter, and Itamar Singer. Eric H. Cline has shown true friendship by reading the manuscript twice. During the preparation of this book I have also benefited from the kind advice of many colleagues and friends, among them are David Ben-Shlomo, Yoram Cohen, Yuval Gadot, Ayelet Gilboa, Aren Maeir, Laura Mazov, Michael Press, Itzik Shai, and Alex Zukerman.

Inbal Samet has put much skill and effort into the English editing of the manuscript.

Beatrice Rehl of Cambridge University Press has walked me through the long process of preparing the manuscript for publication with admirable patience. Her comments, as well as those of two anonymous reviewers, have greatly improved this book.

This book was published with the support of the Israel Science Foundation.

Finally, I wish to thank my family for years of understanding. I am grateful to my parents, Ronit and Isaac Yasur-Landau; my brother, Daniel; my sister, Dana; my wife, Shelly; and my sons, Yonatan and Ariel, for their unconditional love and support of my archaeological dream and for putting up with piles of loose papers, dusty sherds, and excavation equipment over the years.

The migration of the Sea Peoples, the Philistines among them, from the Aegean area to the Levant during the early twelfth century BCE is one of the most intriguing events in the history of the eastern Mediterranean. From a cultural point of view, it was a watershed process in which the movement of the populace connected East and West during the great divide between the collapse of the Late Bronze Age civilizations and the beginning of the era of nation-states in the Iron Age. As a product of the very beginning of the Dark Age of Greece, the migration illuminates the earliest efforts to reconstruct social structures in the Aegean after the fall of the Mycenaean palaces. In Cyprus, it contributed to further connect the island to the realm of Aegean culture, which would later lead to Hellenization. In the Levant, the migrants formed their own political communities, separate from both the Canaanite city-state system and the Egyptian empire. Establishing themselves along the coast, the Sea Peoples formed a long-standing cultural and political antithesis to the Israelites in the central hill country, destined to shape the history of the biblical world.

The study of the Philistine migration is also a methodological treasure trove from a point of view of both the archaeology and the anthropology of migration. During the late 1990s, the exponential rise in the theoretical examination of migration in archaeology created a plethora of methodological frameworks, as well as a need for well-documented case studies against which these frameworks could be tested. The extraordinarily rich archaeological data from twelfth-century-BCE sites in the Aegean, Anatolia, Cyprus, and the Levant, together with supporting literary evidence, make the Philistine migration one of the best-documented case studies of migration in the ancient world. The data enable us to investigate practically every aspect of the migrants society, from political structures to perceptions of gender, and from subsistence economy to their ethnicity and intercultural relations between migrants and local populations.