by Daphne Rousseau
The
cemetery's discovery marks the "crowning achievement" of some three
decades of excavations in the area, the expedition's organizers say.
Some of the site's finds were going on display Sunday at the Rockefeller Archaeological Museum in Jerusalem.
Almost
three millennia since the Philistines were wiped off the face of the
earth by Babylonian armies, a US archaeologist was hard at work crouched
in one of their funerary chambers at the excavation in the
Mediterranean city of Ashkelon.
Brush
in hand he delicately extracted from the sandy soil the complete
skeleton of a Philistine buried with a terracotta perfume flask, fused
to the skull with the passage of time.
"This
discovery is a crowning achievement, the opportunity to finally see
them face to face," said archaeologist Daniel Master, in charge of the
site excavated since 1985 under the Leon Levy Expedition, affiliated
with Harvard University's Semitic Museum, among other institutions.
"With
these 145 corpses we hope not only to understand their funeral customs,
but to collect clues in the bones to understand how they lived, to
bring the Philistines to life again," he told AFP.
Bone
samples taken from the site are currently undergoing DNA, radiocarbon
and other tests to try to shed fresh light on the Philistines’ origin.
The
first graves were discovered in Ashkelon in 2013 on the site of its
ancient Philistine port city, which had 13,000 inhabitants at its peak.
Today
the area lies in a national park popular with Israeli families from
modern Ashkelon who come for a stroll along the seaside lawns and paths.
- Sea people? -
Who
were the Philistines? The origins of this "sea people" -- a term also
used to describe their Phoenician contemporaries -- remain a mystery.
Their red-and-black pottery suggests they may have come from the Mycenaean civilisation of the Aegean.
"What
is certain is that they were strangers in the Semitic region," where
their presence between 1200 and around 600 BC is evident on a thin
coastal strip running from present-day Gaza to Tel Aviv, said Master.
Traders
and seafarers, they spoke a language of Indo-European origin, did not
practice circumcision and ate pork and dog, as proven by bones and marks
found on them in the ruins of the other four Philistine cities: Gaza,
Gath, Ashdod and Ekron.
Beyond
the previously scanty archaeological record, the Philistines are known
mostly from the Old Testament account given by their neighbors and
bitter enemies, the ancient Israelites.
The
book of Samuel describes the capture by Philistine fighters of the Ark
of the Covenant and the duel between their giant warrior Goliath felled
by a stone from David's sling.
From
these biblical descriptions of savage marauders comes the modern usage
of "philistine" to mean a person without culture or manners.
- Hard lives -
A
few hundred meters (yards) from the dig, at its outdoor laboratory,
anthropologist and pathologist Sherry Fox told the skeletons' story.
"In their teeth, we can see that they did not have an easy life," she said.
"We
see these lines that indicate a growth interruption as the teeth are
forming. There were problems in childhood with either fever or
malnutrition."
"We
also see from their bones that they were hard workers, they practised
inbreeding and they used their teeth as tools, probably in the weaving
industry," she said softly, holding up a skull.
She said they were "normal size" with no evidence of any Goliath-sized giants.
Master said that, despite similar-sounding names, there is no connection between the Philistines and today's Palestinians.
"The words are similar, but not the people," he said.
"We
know here in Ashkelon that these Philistines were completely destroyed
by (Babylonian king) Nebuchadnezzar in December of 604 BC," he said.
"Everything that came after was very different and a very different group of people."
The 30 years of excavations at the Ashkelon cemetery come to an end this summer, when the dig will be reburied.
