Los filisteos

The five graves found at Gezer, of which a fully illustrated detailed description will be found in Excavation of Gezer, vol. i, pp. 289–300, were so absolutely different from native Palestinian graves of any period that unless they were those of Philistines or some other foreign tribe they would be inexplicable. They were oblong rectangular receptacles sunk in the ground and covered with large slabs. Each contained a single body stretched out (not crouched, as in the Canaanite interments), the head, with one exception, turned to the east. Ornaments and food-deposits were placed around. The mouth-plate found on some of the skeletons was an important link with Cretan tradition, and the graves, as a whole, show decided kinship with the shaft-graves of Knossos or Mycenae, although naturally the art-centre has shifted to Cyprus, which was the origin of such of the deposits as had no Egyptian analogies. The bones from these tombs presented analogies with Cretan bones (seep. 60 ante); but of course five skeletons are quite insufficient as a basis for anthropological deductions.

With further excavation the debt of Palestinian civilization to the

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[paragraph continues] Philistines will probably be found to be even greater than the foregoing paragraphs would suggest. Briefly, the impression which the daily study of objects found in excavation has made on the present writer is, that from about 1400–1200 B.C. onwards to about 800 B.C. Western Palestine was the scene of a struggle between the Aegean and Egyptian civilizations, with a slight mingling of Mesopotamian influence, and that the local tribes took a merely passive interest in the conflict and made no contribution whatever to its development.

(4) The Biblical and other literary sources point to the same conclusion.

Let us take as an illustration the art of Architecture. It is notable that the only Palestine temples we read about in the Old Testament, until the building of Solomon's temple, are the houses of the Philistine deities. 1 Yahweh has a simple tent; the Canaanite deities have to be content with their primitive High Places—open areas of ground with rude pillar-stones. But Gaza, Ashdod, and Beth-Shan have their temples, and most likely the place called Beth-Car and some of the Beth-Dagons derived their Semitic names from some conspicuous temples of gods of the Philistine pantheon.

We can deduce something as to the architecture of the Gaza temple from the account of its destruction by Samson (Judges xvi). There were two groups of spectators—a large crowd (the figure 3000 need not be taken literally) on the roof, and the lords and their attendants inside. If Samson was also inside, those on the roof could not have seen him, for no hypaethrum of any probable size would have allowed any considerable number to enjoy the sport. Samson must therefore have been outside the temple; and it follows that the lords and their attendants must have been, not in an enclosed naos, but under an open portico. That is to say, the structure must have been a building of the megaron type. When Samson rested—just where we should expect, at the edge of the grateful shade of the portico, where he could the more quickly recover his strength but would be at a respectful distance from the Philistine notables—he seized the wooden pillars of the portico, which probably tapered

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downwards in the Mycenean style. He pushed them off their bases by 'bowing himself with all his might', and, the portico being distyle and having thus no other support, he brought the whole structure down. Only a megaron plan will satisfy all the conditions of the story.

Buildings such as this must have been familiar to David in Gath, and perhaps the sight of them suggested to his mind the idea of erecting a more worthy temple to his own Deity, as soon as he came into his kingdom. And when the work was carried out by Solomon, we see that the same model was followed.

[Fig. 11. Sketch-plans and Elevations of the Marneion at Gaza and of Solomon's Temple (accessory buildings omitted). The dimensions of the latter are figured in cubits: the former is not to scale.]

Click to enlarge
Fig. 11. Sketch-plans and Elevations of the Marneion at Gaza and of Solomon's Temple (accessory buildings omitted). The dimensions of the latter are figured in cubits: the former is not to scale.

The description in 1 Kings vi, vii is not an architect's specification, and it has numerous technical terns hard to understand. Many attempts have been made to design a building which should conform to this account, helped out by the not always trustworthy Josephus. The mutual incompatibility of these restorations (to say nothing of their prima facie architectural improbability) is sufficient to deter the present writer from attempting to add to their number. The main

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lines of the description are, however, clear enough to show with what kind of building we have to deal. We need not attempt to assign a place to the subsidiary external buildings in three stories, their winding stairs and other appurtenances, erected against the outside of the main structure. But we note that the latter was oblong, 60 cubits long, 30 cubits high, and 20 cubits broad. These figures show a classical sense of proportion for which we look in vain in any ancient building that excavation has revealed in Palestine. A portico in front, of the breadth of the house, was 20 cubits broad and 10 cubits deep. Here again the dimensions are proportioned. The portico was distyle, like that in the temple of Gaza: the two pillars were called by names which show that they were NOT massēbōth—'the stablisher' and 'strength in it' are very suitable names for pillars that have to bear the responsibility of keeping up a heavy portico. These pillars had shafts 18 cubits long, and capitals 5 cubits high—a total length of 23 cubits, which leaves, when subtracted from the height of the building, 7 cubits, a margin that is just about sufficient for the entablature above and the plinth below. At the opposite end of the building 'the oracle' or 'the most holy place' corresponds exactly to the opisthodomos. It was 20 cubits square, which left a naos, measuring 30 cubits by 20, in the middle of the building: the 'forty cubits' of 1 Kings vi. 16 evidently includes the portico.

With regard to the ordinary domestic architecture of the Philistines, it must be admitted that the excavations which have been made in Philistine towns do not lead us to infer that they were on the whole much better housed than their Semitic neighbours. Amos, is true, speaks of the 'palaces' of Gaza and Ashdod (i. 8, iii. 9); but this is rather a favourite word (‏ארמנות‎) of the prophet's, and he finds 'palaces' in other towns as well. To a rough herdsman many buildings would look palatial, which when viewed from another standpoint would hardly make the same impression.

One of the Philistine tombs at Gezer contained a small knife of iron; and this leads us at once to a discussion of fundamental importance.

Inserted into the account of the battle of Michmash there is a very remarkable passage (1 Sam. xiii. 19–23). It is corrupt, and some parts of it cannot be translated, but the meaning of it seems to be something like this: 'Now there was no smith found throughout all the land of Israel, for the Philistines said, "Lest the Hebrews make them sword or spear." But all the Israelites went down to the Philistines to sharpen every man his share, and his coulter, and his axe and his ox-goad (?).' The next verse is too corrupt to translate, and then the passage proceeds: 'In the day of battle there was neither

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sword nor spear in the hand of any of the people, except with Saul and Jonathan themselves.'

This is sometimes referred to as a 'disarmament', but there is no hint of anything of the kind. It simply says that the Philistines kept the monopoly of the iron trade in their own hands, and naturally restricted the sale of weapons of offence to the Hebrews, just as modern civilized nations have regulations against importing firearms among subject or backward communities. The Hebrews were just emerging from the bronze age culture. Iron agricultural implements, which seem slightly to precede iron war-weapons, had been introduced among them 1; but the novelty of iron had not worn off by the time of Solomon when he built his temple without the profaning touch of this metal (1 Kings vi. 7)—just as when Joshua made flint knives to perform the sacred rite of circumcision (Joshua v. 2); the old traditions must be maintained in religious functions. The champions of the Philistines, of course, were able to use iron freely, although for defensive purposes they still use bronze. 2

Goliath had a bronze helmet, a bronze cuirass of scale-armour (not a mail-coat, as in the English translation), bronze greaves, and a bronze 'javelin', but a spear with a great shaft and a heavy head of iron. The armour of 'Ishbi-benob' was probably similar, but the text is corrupt and defective. The armour of Goliath is indeed quite Homeric, and very un-Semitic. The κυνέν πάγχαλκος, the χαλκοκνήμιδες, 3 and the enormous spear—

… 4—

are noteworthy in this connexion, especially the greaves, the Hebrew word for which (‏מצחת‎) occurs nowhere else. The θώραξ λεπιδωτός alone would seem post-Homeric, but this is an argumentum e silentio. Fragments of a scale-cuirass, in iron, and of a rather later date, were found in the excavation of Tell Zakariya, overlooking the scene where the battle is laid (Excavations in Palestine, p. 150). But the culture that Goliath's equipment illustrates, like his ordeal by single combat, is much more European or Aegean than Palestinian.

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In the report of Wen-Amon we found that the Zakkala were busy in the Phoenician ports, and had large influence in Phoenicia. The representations of Phoenician ships, such as the sadly damaged fresco which W. Max Müller has published, 1 shows them to have been identical in type with the ships of the Pulasati. It is highly probable that further research will show that it was due to the influence of the 'Peoples of the Sea' that the Phoenicians were induced to take to their very un-Semitic seafaring life. And it is also probable that it was due to Zakkala influence that the same people abandoned the practice of circumcision, as Herodotus says they did when they had commerce with 'Greeks'. 2

An interesting question now arises. Was it to the Philistines and their kinsmen that the civilized world owes the alphabet? The facts that suggest this query may be briefly stated. For countless generations the Egyptians, the Babylonians, and probably the Hittites, had been lumbering away with their complex syllabaries; scripts as difficult to learn and to use as is the Chinese of to-day. As in China, the complexity of the scripts was a bar to the diffusion of learning: the arts of reading and writing were perforce in the hand of specially trained guilds of scribes. No one thought of the possibility of simplifying the complexities; while current 'hieratic' forms of the letters might come into being with hasty writing, all the elaborate machinery of syllables and ideograms and determinatives was retained without essential modification.

Suddenly we find that a little nation in Syria appears to have hit upon a series of twenty-two easily-written signs by which the whole complex system of the sounds of their language can be expressed with sufficient clearness. If it was really the Phoenicians, of all people, who performed this feat of analysis, it was one of the most stupendous miracles in the history of the world. That the Phoenicians ever originated the alphabet, or anything else, becomes more and more impossible to believe with every advance of knowledge.

The alphabet makes its appearance soon after the movements of the 'sea-peoples'. Zakar-Baal is found keeping his accounts, not on clay tablets (and therefore not in cuneiform) but on papyrus, which he imports from Egypt in large quantities. And we are tempted to ask if the characters he used were some early form of the signs of the so-called 'Phoenician' alphabet.

The oldest specimen of this alphabet yet found has come to light in Cyprus: the next oldest is the far-famed Moabite Stone.

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[paragraph continues] W. Max Müller 1 cleverly infers from some peculiarities in the rendering of names in the list of Sheshonk's captured towns, that the scribe of that document was working from a catalogue in which the names were written in the Phoenician alphabet. This would bring the use of this alphabet in Palestine back to about 930 B.C., or about a century earlier than the Moabite Stone. A letter in neo-Babylonian cuneiform, probably not much earlier than this, and certainly of local origin, was found at Gezer: the date of the introduction of the Phoenician alphabet is thus narrowed down very closely.

Whence came the signs of this alphabet? De Rougé's theory, which derived them from Egyptian hieratic, was the most reasonable of any, but no longer commands favour. There was for long a script of linear signs, strangely resembling the Phoenician alphabet, in use in Crete. It must be admitted, however, that so far no very satisfactory analogies have been drawn between them, though their comparison is not without promise of future fruit.

But in this connexion the Phaestos Disk once more seems to assume importance. We are inclined to ask if it is possible that in the script of which this document is so far the sole representative, we are to see the long-sought origin? It is not unreasonable to suppose that in process of time the script of the Disk would become simplified into just such a linear script as that alphabet: and the principle of elision of the terminal vowel of syllables, already noticed in analysing the inscription on the Disk, is just what is wanted to help the process of evolution over that last most difficult fence, which divides a syllabary from a pure alphabet. Suppose that three syllables, ka, ko, ku, represented each by a special symbol, lost their vowel under certain grammatical or euphonic conditions; then all three being simply pronounced k might in writing become confused, leading ultimately to the choice of one of the syllabic signs to denote the letter k. Thus an alphabet of consonants would develop, which is just what we have in the Phoenician alphabet. The 45 +x characters of the original script—for we have no guarantee that we have all the characters of the script represented on the disk—could very easily wear down by some such process as this to the twenty-two signs of the Phoenician alphabet.

As to the forms of the letters, in the total absence of intermediate links, and our total ignorance of the phonetic value of the Phaestos signs, it would be premature to institute any elaborate comparisons between the two scripts. The Phaestos Disk is dated not later than

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[paragraph continues] 1600 B.C., the Phoenician alphabet cannot be traced even so far back as about 1000 B.C., and what may have happened in the intervening six hundred years we do not know. But some arresting comparisons are already possible. The symbol which I have called (h) might well in rapid writing develop into the Phoenician sign aleph. The little man running (a) is not unlike some forms of tzade. The head (e) both in name and shape reminds us of rēsh. The dotted triangle (i) recalls daleth or teth, the fish (l) in name and to some extent in shape suggests nun—it is notable that the fish on the Disk always stands upright on its tail—the five-leaved sprig (w) is something like samekh, the water-sign (ß) might be mem (the three teeth of the Phoenician letter preserving the three lines of the original sign). The manacles (z) resembles beth, the nail-pillar or prop (ζ) resembles nay in both shape and meaning, the remarkable key (θ) simplifies into zayin, the square (σ) into gimel, and the object (π) whatever it may be, into pe. These tentative equivalents have been added for comparison to the table of characters on p. 116. The direction of writing is from right to left in each case.

The plumed head-dress, so conspicuous as a sign on the Disk, connects it with the Philistines: and the evidence of forded us by the Golénischeff papyrus of the Syrian colonies of Philistines, or of their near kinsmen the Zakkala, links it with the Phoenicians. How far it may be possible to make further comparisons, with the various scripts of Crete, Cyprus, and Asia Minor, are questions which must be left for future discoveries and for special research.

We are not here writing a history of the alphabet: but one or two points may be noticed which have a bearing on the subject. It is commonly assumed that because the names of the letters have a meaning in Semitic, and no meaning in Greek, therefore they are Semitic words adapted into Greek. This is, however, a non sequitur. 1 It would be more probable that the borrowing nation should cast about for words similar in sound, and possessing a meaning which would make the names of the letters easily remembered. Such an attempt would be sure to be unsuccessful in some cases: and in point of fact there are several letter-names in the Semitic alphabet to which the tortures of the Inquisition have to be applied before a meaning can be extracted from them through Semitic. It may thus be that all the letter-names are a heritage from some pre-Hellenic, non-Semitic language: and instead of the old idea of a Phoenician Ur-Alphabet from which all the South Semitic, North African, West

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[paragraph continues] Asian, Hellenic, and Italic alphabetic scripts are derived, we are to picture a number of parallel and nearly related alphabets developing out of one of the hieroglyphic syllabaries of the Aegean basin—one of which scripts was taught to the Phoenicians by the despised Philistines. Whoever invented the alphabet laid the foundation-stone of civilization. Can it be that we owe this gift to the Philistines, of all people?

And even this is not all. The rude tribes of Israel were forced to wage a long and stubborn fight with the Philistines for the possession of the Promised Land. For long it seemed doubtful whether Canaan would be retained by the Semitic tribes or lost to them: and it is no mere accident that the best-known name of the country is derived from that of the sea-rovers. In the struggle the Hebrews learned the lessons of culture which they needed for their own advancement: and what was more important, they learned their own essential unity. The pressure of external opposition welded, as nothing else could have done, their loosely-knitted clans into a nation. This was the historic function of the Philistines; they accomplished their task, and then vanished with startling suddenness from the stage. But the Chosen People were led on from strength to strength, till they too fulfilled their mission of teaching mankind to look forward to a time when the knowledge of the Lord should cover the earth as the waters cover the sea.

Thus the influence of the Philistines remains, even if indirectly, a heritage of humanity to the end of time.

Errata

page 125: 'it it'->'is'