The Appearance, Formation and Transformation of Philistine Culture: New Perspectives and New Finds

In the early/mid-12th century BCE, the social and cultural milieu in the Southern Levant went through deep changes (e.g., WARD and JOUKOWSKY 1992; GITIN et al. 1998; KILLEBREW 2005; YASUR-LANDAU 2010; CLINE 2014). This is manifested in various ways, including: 1. the gradual waning of the Egyptian control of Canaan; 2. a drawn-out process of destruction and/or depopulation of many of the Canaanite city states; 3. the appearance of “new groups” in the region, in the inland (identified by most scholars as the precursors of the “Israelites”, Aramaeans, and others) and along some of the coastal regions; and 4., the primary focus of this article, the advent of so-called Sea Peoples, and the most notable among them, the Peleset, in the southern Coastal Plain of Canaan (e.g., HITCHCOCK and MAEIR 2014; MAEIR et al. 2013).