In this study, Assaf Yasur-Landau examines the early history of the biblical Philistines who were among the 'Sea Peoples' who migrated from the Aegean area to the Levant during the early twelfth century BC. Creating an archaeological narrative of the migration of the Philistines, he combines an innovative theoretical framework on the archaeology of migration with new data from excavations in Greece, Turkey, Cyprus, Syria, Lebanon, and Israel and thereby reconstructs the social history of the Aegean migration to the southern Levant. The author follows the story of the migrants from the conditions that caused the Philistines to leave their Aegean homes, to their movement eastward along the sea and land routes, to their formation of a migrant society in Philistia and their interaction with local populations in the Levant. Based on the most up-to-date evidence, this book offers a new and fresh understanding of the arrival of the Philistines in the Levant.

Table of Contents

Introduction; 1. The archaeological identification of migration and other ranges of interregional interactions; 2. Setting the scene: the Mycenaean palatial culture and the outside world; 3. The twelfth-century-BCE Aegean: political and social background; 4. Preconditions for migration; 5. Along the routes; 6. Strictly business? The southern Levant and the Aegean in the thirteenth to the early twelfth century BCE; 7. The material culture change in the twelfth-century Philistia; 8. The Philistine society and the settlement process; 9. A short history of the Aegean immigration to the Levant.

Author Biography

Assaf Yasur-Landau is Senior Researcher at the Leon Recanati Institute for Maritime Studies, Haifa University. He has edited three volumes and published numerous articles on the the archaeology of the Levant and interactions between the Aegean world and the Levant, including the Philistine migration, with an emphasis on the investigation of the personal lives of ancient people.