III
Egypt resisted conquest; but the Pharaohs lost control of the Nile Delta, which, as can be seen from Wenamun’s tale, led a separate existence in the eleventh century under autonomous rulers who paid no more than lip-service to their suzerain lords in Upper Egypt. Further north, the events of around 1200 did not lead to an immediate and total collapse of Mycenaean cultural life, though if the Greek legends have any foundation, they did cause enormous political damage. In fact, there were places that escaped destruction. The most important was Athens: although it was not a town of the first rank in Mycenaean times, the acropolis was still inhabited, and burials continued in the Kerameikos cemetery down below; possibly it escaped destruction because of its natural defences – not just the steep sides of the citadel, topped with ‘Cyclopean’ walls, but a water supply which could help it withstand a long siege.31 Even Mycenae was still inhabited for a while after the destruction of its larger buildings. In northern Greece, within Thessaly, and on several Aegean islands, conditions remained peaceful; Rhodes was the focal point of a trade route taking the good-quality ‘Late Helladic IIIC’ pottery of the Dodecanese to Greece, southern Italy and Syria; traditional designs, such as the octopus motif, were still strongly favoured. Emborio on Chios flourished as a centre of Mycenaean trade. The experience of Troy was very similar: after the destruction of Troy VIIa, a new, though less luxurious, city emerged.
The fact that an area in the north of Greece remained untouched by destruction suggests that those who attacked the great centres came from the south, across the sea; but the fact that not all the islands were affected suggests an invasion from the north. Greek tradition noted the remarkable survival of Athens in the face of an invasion from the north by Dorian Greeks. Since the Dorians were supposedly the ancestors of their Spartan rivals, the Athenians laid more emphasis on this tradition than the archaeological evidence allows. The leading authority on the end of the Mycenaean age commented: ‘there should in this case, however, be evidence not only of invasion but also of invaders’.32 He could find only two innovations: the cut-and-thrust sword and a type of safety-pin with a curved front known as the violin-bow fibula. The argument that new swords were arriving in the eastern Mediterranean may well explain the success of conquering forces pitted against Troy, Mycenae or the Syrian coastal towns; but it does not prove a massive invasion had occurred, and the Mycenaeans had access to the same swords. As for the safety-pins, very similar changes in design took place across the central and eastern Mediterranean in this period, and reflect changes in taste and perhaps greater skill in production, as far west as Sicily. And yet the evidence of dialect seems clear enough. Doric Greek dialects penetrated the Peloponnese. Meanwhile, refugees from Mycenaean Greece settled in Cyprus, marking the first injection of a substantial Greek population into the island and bringing their dialect (which otherwise survived only in remote Arcadia) with them. The philological evidence is for once neatly supported by the evidence of archaeology, for they carried with them the pottery styles of the area round Mycenae, which they long perpetuated, and a fashion for chamber tombs à la grecque.33
Yet the old culture was being transformed. The evidence is not easy to read, and one can debate whether the change from family chamber tombs to single or double slab-lined tombs (‘cist tombs’) betokened a change in population, a change in fashion or a lack of resources which made it impossible to organize a labour force able to build a family mausoleum. The signs that old skills were being lost can also be read in the pottery, which archaeologists class pejoratively as ‘Sub-Mycenaean’. The Mycenaean civilization of the Aegean region was eventually affected too, and before 1000 the trading centres at Miletos and Emborio were wrecked; quantities of goods moving across the eastern Mediterranean were declining sharply, and what movement there was suffered constant harassment from pirates, known in later Greek tradition as ‘Tyrsenians’. Although attention inevitably focuses on the eastern Mediterranean at this crucial moment, there is also evidence of a hiatus in the central Mediterranean. In Sicily, in the mid-thirteenth century BC, ‘a time of war and fear began’; but the threat came from the Italian mainland, and not from distant Sea Peoples.34 Judging from the finds of Late Helladic pottery in Sicily, contact with Greece began to decline around 1200 BC and may have come to an end by 1050 BC.35
When they came, the land migrations into southern Greece were not coordinated in the way that the raids on Egypt were. They were probably not even invasions, in the sense of hostile armed conquests, so much as a slow but continuous trickle of northern Greeks, living in and around modern Epeiros and Albania. They confirmed and consolidated a trend towards a simpler, more basic existence. But such an existence greatly lessened the role of the Greek lands in what remained of the trade of the Mediterranean world. Contacts did continue: by the eleventh century Athens, which was the major centre of the production of pottery in the linear ‘proto-Geometric’ style, sent its goods across the Aegean, and this pottery, some of it quite sophisticated in style and technique, has been found at Miletos (now reoccupied) and at Old Smyrna (a new settlement). Its presence there is an indication that Greeks were beginning to recreate a trading network linking Asia Minor to the Greek mainland by sea, out of which the vibrant civilization of Greek Ionia would emerge in the eighth century.
IV
A papyrus known as the Onomastikon of Amenope, discovered at the end of the nineteenth century, helpfully places the Peleshet in southern Palestine, the Tjekker in the middle (confirmed by Wenamun) and the Shardana in the north, according well with the archaeological evidence – Sea Peoples inhabited Acre, and Acre was possibly one of the bases set up by the Egyptians, using mercenary garrisons.36 Their ties to this region were so intense that one group, the Peleshet, gave their name to the area. The word ‘Peleshet’, like the Ethiopian Semitic word ‘Falasha’ used of the Ethiopian Jews, signifies ‘foreigner’ or ‘wanderer’; they became, in biblical Hebrew, Pelishtim; in Greek their land became Palaistina, whence the terms ‘Philistine’ and ‘Palestine’. The term can also be linked to the word ‘Pelasgian’, an impossibly vague term used by later Greek writers to identify a variety of pre-Greek peoples in the Aegean, some of whom were said to live in Crete – foreigners or wanderers, as the Semitic term prescribes. With the help of archaeology, it is possible to go much further in identifying the Philistines. Pottery of the twelfth and eleventh centuries BC found on Philistine sites such as Ashdod in modern Israel is similar in style to Late Helladic pottery from the Mycenaean world; the closest parallels have been identified on Cyprus, although that does not prove their point of origin, since Cyprus was raided persistently by the Sea Peoples and settled by Mycenaeans.37 This suggests a gradual process of migration which started about 1300 BC, punctuated by dramatic moments of destruction: if the migrants were not allowed to settle, they could take up arms, as the Pharaohs discovered; if they were welcomed, or even defeated by the Egyptians, they could be settled on the land, and many served alongside the Shardana in Pharaoh’s armies.
The area of choice for Philistine settlement became the coastline northwards from Gaza; their four major centres were Gaza, Ekron, Ashkelon and Ashdod. ‘Proto-Philistines’ arrived in Ashdod and brought with them the techniques and styles of Mycenaean potters (their Mycenaean-looking pots were not imported but manufactured in situ from local clays). It was the Philistines (and Cypriots) who preserved longest the traditional designs of the Mycenaean world, when within Greece they had given way to simpler, more schematic decoration. A favourite design, found on wares from Gezer in Israel, Tell Aytun in the West Bank and other sites, shows a long-necked bird with its head sometimes turned to face behind; the design is elegantly combined with hatched lines, thin red stripes and other patterns.38 Their pottery and their extraordinary anthropomorphic clay coffins, found in the Gaza Strip, also reveal influences from Egyptian art. It is hardly surprising that soldiers in Egyptian service should have borrowed Egyptian styles; but Mycenaean influence was overwhelming and betray
s their original identity.
The home-made pottery in Mycenaean style proves that those who crossed the seas were not just soldiers and pirates. These migrations were on a grander scale, bringing whole families, taking along potters as well as fighters. The Philistine settlement at Tell Qasile, in what is now Tel Aviv, became a centre of agricultural trade in wine and oil. The coming of the Philistines did not result in a surge in commercial contact with the Aegean; rather, it had the opposite effect, as trading cities were destroyed and the old way of life along the Canaanite coast came to an end. Commerce in foodstuffs remained active, as deficiencies in one region were compensated by surpluses in another; but the luxury trade of the great days of Mycenaean civilization had shrunk and there no longer existed great palaces where travelling merchants could sell articles of prestige.
The Philistines came from the Greek world.39 They were the kinsmen of Agamemnon and Odysseus, speakers, when they arrived, of Greek or possibly Luvian. A couple of seals carry scratched marks which resemble letters from the Linear A or B syllabaries. The constant biblical insistence that the Philistines came from Caphtor (Crete) clearly reflects local traditions. Jeremiah called the Philistines ‘the remnant of the isle of Caphtor’. King David killed the Philistine giant Goliath, whose name recalls the Greek hero Alyattes (originally Wallyates); Goliath’s armour, described in the Bible, is very similar to that of contemporary Greeks, illustrated on the Warrior Vase from Mycenae.40 Having spent some time as an exile among the Philistines, David later employed what were clearly Cretan guards (‘Cherethites’).
Once settled in Palestine, many Philistines lost their maritime vocation, turned to farming and crafts and rapidly adopted Semitic speech and Canaanite gods; originally, they brought along their own gods and goddesses. Small painted figurines with raised arms, thought to represent an Aegean earth-goddess, have been found at Ashdod and are similar to clay idols found in the Mycenaean world.41 At Ekron, in the interior, they built cult centres with hearths in the Aegean style which gradually modified their appearance to turn into Canaanite temples.42 Here, knives with iron blades were discovered, for use in temple rituals; the Bible relates that they kept control of iron supplies so that the Israelites would not have the benefit of its use, mainly in fact confined to prized objects, such as iron bracelets, which were the height of fashion. The Philistines were not simply marauders and destroyers, Philistines in the modern sense of the word. They created a vibrant town-based civilization along the coast of Palestine which long retained the imprint of their Mycenaean origins. The Philistines show how a group of mercenaries and settlers could take charge of other people’s lands, while the inhabitants of those lands, in the very long term, won a cultural victory by drawing them into Semitic Canaanite culture. They turned away from the Mediterranean towards the interior, occupying sites in the foothills of southern Canaan such as Ekron, which became famous for its olive-oil presses; and there they found themselves at odds with the Children of Israel.
V
Mention of Israel brings to the fore the question whether it was not just the Philistines but the Israelites who were set on the move during the convulsions of the Late Bronze Age: God asked through the prophet Amos, ‘Did I not bring up Israel from the land of Egypt, and the Philistines from Caphtor?’43 Those who accept the historicity of the Israelite Exodus would generally assign it to the period between about 1400 and 1150; many of the details of the biblical account of the arrival of the Children of Israel in Egypt (if not their departure) match other evidence well – the arrival of Semitic travellers in search of food supplies and the occasional presence at court of Semitic viziers not too dissimilar to Joseph. The great Song of the Sea attributed to Moses after the Egyptian chariots had become stuck in the mud of the Red Sea is clearly very ancient and speaks of a style of chariot warfare which is consonant with the time of the Sea Peoples.44 The presence of nomadic apiru or habiru in the lands to the east of Egypt has also been mentioned, and it is possible that they were involved in the fall of Ugarit; the king seems to mention them in one of his desperate last letters. Subject populations in Egypt, sometimes war captives, have also been encountered, and this is reminiscent of the long period of servitude the Israelites are said to have suffered in Egypt. A more cautious approach to the evidence would draw analogies with the way that Homer was able to refer back to features of a society hundreds of years before his time: oral histories, traditions, material from records of neighbouring peoples, could also have enabled the early Israelites to paint such a detailed and moving account of their long sojourn in Egypt and of their dramatic escape from Pharaoh’s chariots. Equally, there is a powerful argument that the great movements of peoples described in this chapter set off many smaller movements, of which the migration of some Semitic tribes from Egypt was one, which went unnoticed (excepting Merneptah’s brief reference) in the archives of the Near East; the Israelites were apiru nomads who returned for a while to their nomadism, cast away their subjection to Pharaoh and subjected themselves instead to their own God.
On entering Canaan the Children of Israel certainly did not destroy either Jericho or Aï, which had been demolished many hundreds of years earlier, but settled with their sheep and goats (but no pigs) in villages in the hills, entering into a mutual covenant under their own God, into which they also admitted other tribes and peoples such as the Danites.45 Just as the Philistines became to all intents Canaanites, serving Dagon and other gods of local peoples, the Danites became Hebrews, serving the God of Israel. The contact of the Israelites with the Mediterranean at this period was slight, apart from the tribe of Dan, and apart from the growing tension with the Philistines, who had arrived from Caphtor on the edge of the same small patch of land. As the Philistines began to cultivate the soil and merged with the local Canaanite population, they attempted to gain control of areas further inland, and clashed directly with the Israelites. If biblical sources are correct, the conflict peaked around 1000 BC. After King Saul and his son died in a ferocious battle with the Philistines, it fell to David, who had lived among the enemy, to crack Philistine power, using the newly conquered strong-point of Jerusalem as the base from which he supposedly dominated the entire region. Despite these growing military successes, Israelite sites of the eleventh century have left few indications of luxury, and trade with the Mediterranean countries was slight. Even so, the Israelites need to be kept in view, since in the very long term they would have such a massive influence on the history of the Mediterranean peoples. The impression from the Bible is that there were plenty of restless tribes and peoples in the eastern Mediterranean; no one stood still for very long in the lands where Asia and Africa met one another.
The Sea Peoples may not all have come from the sea, and the scale of their migration may not have been as massive as the Egyptian record-makers wanted their readers to believe. But none of this should be taken to underestimate the impact of the Sea Peoples and the Land Peoples, who were evidently just as active. The calamities that occurred at this time were symptoms of a world already falling apart. Political chaos was accompanied by economic crisis, partly experienced in the form of biting famines. A brief mention of plague in the biblical account of the war with the Philistines may indicate that one reason for the disorder was the spread of bubonic plague or a similar disease, and that the roots of the catastrophe must be sought in the same places as the great plague of Justinian’s time and the Black Death. In that case it would not be surprising if all the eastern Mediterranean were convulsed at once. But that, in a period when much is speculation, is perhaps a speculation too far. The end of the Bronze Age in the eastern Mediterranean has been described as ‘one of history’s most frightful turning points’, more calamitous than the fall of the Roman Empire, ‘arguably the worst disaster in ancient history’.46 The First Mediterranean, a Mediterranean whose scope had extended from Sicily to Canaan and from the Nile Delta to Troy, had rapidly disintegrated, and its reconstruction into a trading lake which stretched from the Straits of
Gibraltar to Lebanon would take several hundred years.
The Great Sea: A Human History of the Mediterranean Page 9
