<< News >> Philistines, but Less and Less Philistine
Submitted by coldrum on Wednesday, 16 May 2007 Page Views: 1361
Other ArchaeologyCountry: Israel Archaeologists have applied more polish to the long-tarnished reputation of the Philistines.In recent years, excavations in Israel established that the Philistines had fine pottery, handsome architecture and cosmopolitan tastes. If anything, they were more refined than the shepherds and farmers in the nearby hills, the Israelites, who slandered them in biblical chapter and verse and rendered their name a synonym for boorish, uncultured people.
Archaeologists have now found that not only were Philistines cultured, they were also literate when they arrived, presumably from the region of the Aegean Sea, and settled the coast of ancient Palestine around 1200 B. C.
At the ruins of a Philistine seaport at Ashkelon in Israel, excavators examined 19 ceramic pieces and determined that their painted inscriptions represent a form of writing. Some of the pots and storage jars were inscribed elsewhere, probably in Cyprus and Crete, and taken to Ashkelon by early settlers. Of special importance, one of the jars was made from local clay, meaning Philistine scribes were presumably at work in their new home.
The discovery is reported in the current issue of The Israel Exploration Journal by two Harvard professors, Frank Moore Cross Jr. and Lawrence E. Stager. Dr. Cross is an authority on ancient Middle Eastern languages and scripts. Dr. Stager, an archaeologist, is director of the Leon Levy Expedition to Ashkelon, a Harvard project.
In the report, the two researchers said the inscriptions “reveal, for the first time, convincing evidence that the early Philistines of Ashkelon were able to read and write in a non-Semitic language, as yet undeciphered.”
A few pages on in the article, Dr. Cross and Dr. Stager were more emphatic about the inscription painted in red on the jar fragment made from local clay.
“Perhaps it is not too bold to propose,” they wrote, “that the inscription is written in a form of Cypro-Minoan script utilized and modified by the Philistines — in short, that we are dealing with the Old Philistine script.”
Dr. Cross said in an interview that several signs in the Ashkelon inscriptions “fit in with well-known Cypro-Minoan,” in particular from artifacts recovered at sites in Cyprus and at Ugarit, in Syria. He said the script had some characteristics of Linear A, the writing system used in the Aegean from 1650 B. C. to 1450 B. C. This undeciphered script was supplanted by another, Linear B, which was identified with the Minoan civilization of Crete and was finally decoded in the mid-20th century.
“We can’t read the inscription, and that’s true as well of Cypro-Minoan writing found on Cyprus,” Dr. Cross said. “We will need a lot more samples before we can think of deciphering it.”
The two researchers and other scholars said it was not surprising that the Ashkelon inscriptions were in an Aegean type of writing. The biblical Philistines are assumed to have been a group of the mysterious Sea Peoples who probably originated in the Greek islands and migrated to several places on the far eastern shores of the Mediterranean.
“We had no direct evidence of their early writing,” Dr. Stager said. “We knew they had weights and measures for trading commodities, even precursors of coinage. So we assumed they had some notation or writing system.”
The locally made storage jar, bearing seven signs, was found several years ago buried under debris of a mudbrick building, which appeared to date to no later than 1000 B. C. After the 10th century, the Philistines borrowed their Israelite neighbors’ Old Hebrew script and alphabet then evolving from Phoenician writing.
By then, the Philistines and Israelites had been in such close contact that they appeared to have reached some degree of amity, though tradition never forgot Goliath as the bad Philistine.
Publication of the discovery coincided with an article in Archaeology, a popular magazine of the Archaeological Institute of America, reporting concerns that excavators dig and dig but neglect to publish their findings.
The article cited Dr. Stager’s practices as a primary example, saying the project’s slow publication rate was the reason the Israel Antiquities Authority had “declined to grant Stager and his team a digging license” since 2004.
In an interview, Dr. Stager said, “There was never a denial of a dig license for our excavations at Ashkelon.” He added that he had been “strongly urged” by Israeli antiquities officials to resume excavations this summer.
Political unrest and a plan to concentrate on preparing 10 volumes on excavation results, not a failure to obtain permits, Dr. Stager said, accounted for the sharp reduction in fieldwork since 2000. The first two volumes are to be issued this year, and five more volumes over the next five years.
From the New York Times
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