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- [00:01]
William Duranpool
If you want access to bonus episodes, Reading lists for every series of Empire, a chat community, discounts for all the books mentioned in the week's podcast ad, free listening and a weekly newsletter. Sign up to empire club@www.empirepoduk.com.
- [00:20]
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- [00:46]
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- [00:47]
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- [01:12]
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- [01:50]
Anita Anand
Hello and welcome to Empire with me.
- [01:53]
William Duranpool
Anita Arnand and me William Duranpool and.
- [01:56]
Anita Anand
We are starting a brand new series today, one which has been in the news for the last two years. How would you put it William? I mean the deepest of emotions swirl around the very concept of even discussing this.
- [02:10]
William Duranpool
This is the most divisive subject in the world at the moment. I think it's fair to say there is such high emotions when talking about Gaza and Palestine and Israel. Never have views on this been more polarized. Friendships have been lost. But what is important, I think is that we all need to do our best to understand the long background to this story and that has been notably absent. I haven't seen on a single TV documentary, I haven't seen on a single radio show anything that taught me about the history, the deep history of the story of Gaza. And that's what we're going to try and lay out in the series.
- [02:51]
Anita Anand
Absolutely. So as always on Empire we Sort of try to go back to the very, very beginning. And first of all, you know, one thing that we should all know, Gaza is one of the oldest urban centers on planet Earth, one of the most fought over and contested spaces. We just talked about that for over 3,000 years. And it is also, just look at a map. It's the crossroads between Africa and. And Asia, the desert and the Mediterranean. So for millennia, because of the geographical location of this place, it's been a crucial strategic and economic hub, once an incredibly rich port. And you might remember when we talked about the Nabataeans and got really excited about that, from which spices, incense, perfumes, the things that you perhaps know less about, Wines of Asia, reached Greece and Rome through Gaza. And it was also this sort of sentinel fortress guarding the best land route leading the Levant, the eastern Mediterranean coastline, all the way to Egypt.
- [03:48]
William Duranpool
And I think one of the consistent things you see in history is that everyone wants to own this and conquer it. And over the centuries, we hear the succession of aggressive foreign empires. The Egyptians, the Assyrians, the Greeks, the Romans, the Turks, and finally the British, of course, coming through and fighting here. What's more difficult to see, I think, in the chronicles, because we always get the story of the victors and it's always the victors writing their version. But what we don't see so much in the chronicles are the locals who are living here throughout these centuries and whose DNA has remained remarkably consistent. The modern inhabitants of this land today share much the same wide mix of DNA as the groups who live here today. And successive studies have shown this. When you dig up skeletons from the Bronze Age, they show still a broad similarity to the sort of thing that you're getting with the modern inhabitants of the land. So it isn't like there's been a massive, despite all these conquests, that there's been massive extinctions, if you like. In a very broad sense, the DNA is consistent over the millennia. And of course, today, as we just said, this area is still at war and the people of Gaza are now clinging on, threatened with both starvation and expulsion. And this is a part of the world that dominates our front pages. Yet we do not know this early history, and we should know it. It's absolutely crucial to understand current events, to know what preceded it in detail, going really into the minutiae so that people could understand it. And I don't think there has been in any media anywhere in the world a series like this. I've been looking around and searching for it, and it just hasn't Been this. So I think this is the first time that people have attempted to put into broadcast form a deep dive into the history of Gaza.
- [05:30]
Anita Anand
So, look, that's what we're doing. That's what this new series is about. Going to talk about the history, the inhabitants, the peoples who've passed through and, you know, the importance of this national narrow stretch of land. And, you know, as William was saying, this is obviously a deeply contested, divisive subject and so we are treading into this with care, put it that way. We're going to try and be very careful about this. We will lay out the different views about the past. And we do this because we have the hand holding of some of the top academics in the world on this region. And to start, let me welcome the new professor of Ancient History at Cambridge, Jo Quinn, author of the magnificent how the World Made the West Year History. Welcome to you, Jo.
- [06:14]
Jo Quinn
Thank you. It's an honour to be here.
- [06:16]
William Duranpool
We should say that Jo's wonderful book, how the World Made the West, has just been long listed for the Cundle Prize for History, which is the world's grandest history prize. So we're all the luckier to have her here.
- [06:25]
Anita Anand
Is that the one you really, really, really want or is that one that you grew up?
- [06:28]
William Duranpool
That's the one I've once been a finalist for. Didn't even get on the long list this time.
- [06:33]
Anita Anand
Oh, darling, oh, darling. I didn't want to tap dance over your grief, but, yeah, let's do that. Tippity tap. Well done, Jo.
- [06:40]
William Duranpool
I can't think of a nicer person to be displace.
- [06:44]
Jo Quinn
I feel like I'm being made the Assyrian King here.
- [06:47]
Anita Anand
Yes, you are. And wear your crown with pride, lady. So let's first of all just situate Gaza. I mean, most people who watch the news will know where it is, but let's situate it in old biblical times, if you like. I mean, where do we place it?
- [07:01]
Jo Quinn
The city of Gaza, the wider Gaza Strip, as we now call it, is in the southern stretch of the Levantine coast. But Levant, of course, is the name that European travelers gave the region of Western Asia between the Mediterranean and Iraq. So it's literally, literally the land of the rising sun, modern Syria, Lebanon, Israel, Palestine and Jordan. And the coastal plain is a kind of fairly narrow strip of flatland. It's below the spine of highlands that run all the way down the Levant from north to south. So from Mount Lebanon, the Golan Heights, the West Bank, Jerusalem, they're all part of that very mountainous Terrain above the coast and the plain is a very different world. So it's this very good farming land, it's got a pretty gentle climate, but it's also, of course, more open to attack both from sea and land. And it is, as you said, Anita, it's this bottleneck of communications between Africa and Asia and Gaza itself is the southernmost port on that coast. And it does it, it marks the end point, the Mediterranean end of that caravan route that's been bringing spices and incense up from southern Arabia for millennia. The truth is that the population of the cities of the southern Levant is especially the port cities is always going to be a mix. It would be strange if there weren't both local and non local elements. And that's what the culture looks like too.
- [08:23]
William Duranpool
It's interesting when Victorian and Edwardian travellers start using that word Levant and talk about people as being Levantine, they mean actually mixed, don't they? It's one of the defining features of this region that in the late Ottoman period, when British travellers are first using this word, that you have every community, every religion. And this is not just true of the 19th century when this word is coined, it's equally true of the early centuries that you write about. Joe, I think what we should say also is it's very fertile. I mean, I think a lot of people, a lot of us think about sand in Gaza. We hear about these tunnels which Hamas are digging through the sand. And I think many of us, particularly seeing the recent photographs of the destruction in Gaza, assume that it's a desert. In fact, the whole point of Gaza is it's very fertile, the Wadi Gaza has underground waters which bubble up and which for millennia have attracted, you know, migratory seabirds. It's where they stop too, on their way in every direction. And as we mentioned at the beginning, this is somewhere that has grown the not just wine, but the best wine of the ancient world. Sweet wine, like the modern Chateau Yquem, you know, the kind of smartest sweet wine you could possibly buy. That was what Gaza wine was. And last week, actually I went to an exhibition which I think, Jo, you're going to go to next week, called the Treasures of Gaza in the Institut de Mont d' Arabe in Paris. And the first thing you see when you walk into the first hall of that exhibition are these enormous long amphorae which archaeologists call torpedo jars, because they do look very like torpedoes, except they're obviously ceramic. And these once held this incredibly sought after wine that from the most ancient times, right up until about the 6th century to Anglo Saxon times was being exported around the entire Mediterranean and beyond to Britain because it was so very, very delicious. And the grapes there were so very, very special.
- [10:16]
Anita Anand
Joe, can we go right back to sort of where archaeological record begins, if you like, sort of 2000 to 1500 BCE? I mean, what do we know about the people and the place from them?
- [10:29]
Jo Quinn
Okay, so we're in the height of the Bronze Age at this point. So there's these huge inland agricultural empires that are trying to carve up the known world between them. And I should say the known world doesn't include Europe yet, because no one knows much about it and they're even less interested. But from the Gazan point of view, say around 1500 BCE, you've got the Hittites ruling most of Anatolia, modern Turkey to the north, you've got the Mesopotamians, the Babylonian kings in what's now Iraq to the east. And closest of all. So just, just the other side of the desert, you've got Egypt, you know, which is at this point, for 1500 years, been an enormously powerful kingdom and empire. And then, so the Levant itself is, by contrast, this region of small cities and kingdoms. A lot of cities strung along the coast, a lot of small ports also along the rivers, along the roads, up to the mountain passes over to Turkey and Iraq and so on. And all these tiny little polities might say little powers, they're trying to negotiate their position with and between these bigger empires that surround them. And conversely, all the kind of great kings, the big emperors are very keen to control the Levant precisely because it lies in between them. It's a zone of communication between them, very important routes running through it both by donkey and by sail along the coast. For these kings, controlling trade, travel and communications is probably the most important thing.
- [12:04]
William Duranpool
One name that comes up very early on in any discussion of the early history of Gaza are the Canaanites. They appear in the Bible. Tell us about that word, because it's a sort of complicated term, isn't it? No one called themselves the Canaanites.
- [12:18]
Jo Quinn
No, exactly. So it's basically a generic external name for people who live on the Levantine coast and some of the kind of closer inland areas. So when you first come across it, second millennium bce, it's used to mean something like brigand or barbarian or something.
- [12:35]
William Duranpool
Who's using it, Jo?
- [12:36]
Jo Quinn
You say, well, the local kings, basically, because that's who we. We have the evidence from, you know, the documents. Often they're written on their own statues of these small local kings who are talking about each other, essentially. So they use this term Canaan and talk about Canaanites to mean kind of people who live in other parts of the Levant. Nothing very specific. Maybe sort of the way that we might use a word like the midlands or something. And then the Hebrew Bible uses it as again a generic term for people who are living in the whole region of the Levant, at least as far as the River Jordan. So this is the Promised land.
- [13:10]
William Duranpool
So it's not exclusive to the Bible. You have other people using this?
- [13:14]
Jo Quinn
No, no, no. There's lots of other sources for it, but they're all external, as you said. Nobody actually calls themselves a Canaanite. And I think this is very common in antiquity. Outsiders naturally group similar looking and sounding people together just for ease of comprehension, put them in a tidy box with a label on top. That's what we do with people in the past. But it doesn't actually tell us anything about the people themselves.
- [13:38]
Anita Anand
When the Bible talks about does it only use the word sort of Canaan or Canaanites or does the word Gaza come in at all or is that a much, much later terminology that comes in?
- [13:47]
Jo Quinn
I think it would be a different kind of terminology, not necessarily later, because we do have references to Gaza, Ahaza II and so on in the Bronze Age. But I think it's more that the Bible tends to be talking about specific events in specific places and it's more interested in, for instance, Gath, which is another ancient Philistine center.
- [14:11]
Anita Anand
Well, we're coming to that, we're coming to that there because there's a great blockbuster giant of a story coming from there.
- [14:17]
Jo Quinn
I wouldn't want to give the impression that it's kind of erasing Gaza. It's just nothing very important in the Bible happens there.
- [14:23]
William Duranpool
Now. The earliest site, Jo, that archaeologists have identified is one that was dug by an Edwardian archaeologist, the great Flinders Petrie. I remember my grandfather, when I was about 10 years old, giving me an old Victorian lodge audiobook of Flinders Beatri's, 10 years excavating in Egypt. And he digs this site, Tell El Ajul and finds all sorts of early stuff, doesn't he?
- [14:46]
Jo Quinn
That's right. Basically this is ancient Gaza. This is Bronze Age Gaza City. Effectively, unsurprisingly, this is an enormously important port. It's selling grain, olive oil, wine for the whole region. It's also an outlet for copper from the mountains. You've got evidence in the Bronze Age site for imports from local places, Syria, Jordan, the big kingdoms, Mesopotamia, Anatolia and so on. But Also Crete, Mycenaean, Greece. Huge amount of material from Cyprus just across the water. And you also get a lot of sophisticated jewellery and luxury items in the living areas as well. So it's not just a sort of through port. There are people who are actually profiting from all of this, actually in the city itself.
- [15:29]
Anita Anand
And am I right in saying, I mean, correct me if I'm wrong, that the first sort of archaeologically verifiable name and even a face is that of Egyptian pharaoh Thutmose III in Gaza. Is that right? Now, tell us about Thutmose iii. Because sometimes I've heard him referred to as the Napoleon of Egypt. Now what is that all about?
- [15:50]
Jo Quinn
Right, yeah, he's sometimes called Thutmoses the Great or something like that. So he was this kind of brilliant pharaoh. He was a great soldier, a great general, a great strategist. But he had good training because for the first 22 years of his rules, he rules for 45 years altogether.
- [16:07]
Anita Anand
And give us the years, give us the era that we're talking about. I know I went th mose, which is a very Essex pronunciation in retrospect. I mean, I've heard sort of Thutmoses, Thutmoser. I mean, what years are we talking about? How should I. How should I say his name?
- [16:21]
Jo Quinn
I think people worry far too much about pronunciation in the past. We don't have tape recorders, unfortunately. You can read ancient inscriptions in a lot of different ways. So I call him Thutmoses.
- [16:32]
William Duranpool
The Egyptian ones only have consonants, isn't that right?
- [16:35]
Jo Quinn
Yeah, a lot of them do. Some of them only have syllables. End syllables are always tricky. So I think we can call him Thutmose, Thutmose, whatever we like.
- [16:44]
Anita Anand
I think Thutmose is good. Let's stick with that for this podcast. But we're talking. Which years are we talking about? The rule of Thutmose III.
- [16:51]
Jo Quinn
So Thutmose's ruling in the 15th century BCE. He. He first becomes pharaoh in 1479. But the crucial thing is that he has incredible training because for the first 22 years of his reign, he's actually ruling jointly with his stepmother and aunt who's called Hatshepsut. And she's one of only really two female pharaohs.
- [17:12]
Anita Anand
Oh my God. I love Hatshepsut with my whole DNA and bone marrow.
- [17:17]
Jo Quinn
She's incredible.
- [17:18]
Anita Anand
So she was famously the one who, you know, you saw her sometimes depicted with a beard, almost like one of those clip on beards.
- [17:24]
Jo Quinn
But she also, she launches trade Expeditions all the way down the Red Sea. She builds incredible things all over Egypt. She's really an extraordinary character. So he's got 22 years with her. She dies and then he rules alone after that. And he himself has this incredible career. So he expands both south and north, so south into Nubia and north into the Levant. We're in the 1450s BCE now.
- [17:49]
William Duranpool
And he's using Gaza as a kind of forward base, is he?
- [17:52]
Jo Quinn
Yeah, he conquers Gaza and then it's. Yeah, a forward base would be one way to put it. And as you say, it's actually the first men mention of the city of Gaza in Egyptian records, which records its conquest, unfortunately. And that's really when Gaza falls under, in some kind of formal sense, Egyptian control. It's not very strong at first. They have to pay an annual tribute. There's some form of military presence there.
- [18:17]
William Duranpool
And trade is flourishing at this time. It's not just war.
- [18:20]
Jo Quinn
War, war, yeah, yeah. Trade continues to flourish. In general, it's very useful for the great kings that their possessions in the Levant keep up good trading contacts because that's what they're profiting from. They're skimming off, essentially, the profits of trade.
- [18:35]
William Duranpool
And I read somewhere that the pharaohs put a monopoly on this fancy Gazan wine.
- [18:40]
Anita Anand
God, you're obsessed with the wine.
- [18:42]
William Duranpool
Well, it was a big deal. It's a good exhibition. This was the main export.
- [18:47]
Jo Quinn
Okay, I guess I'll learn about that when I go to the exhibition next week.
- [18:51]
Anita Anand
Okay.
- [18:51]
William Duranpool
So we have this sort of sensation of a window opening, don't we, Joe? When we get the Tell El Amarna letters, suddenly it's one of those moments in ancient history when we have detailed correspondence that somehow survives. And it survives in this case because it's written on Egyptian clay tablets which have survived. And they look, according to our lovely producer Anoushka, like big ryvitas, mammoth shredded wheats.
- [19:15]
Anita Anand
They do, yeah.
- [19:18]
William Duranpool
What do they tell us, Jo? Tell us about Tela Nemala letters. What do they say about Gaza?
- [19:21]
Jo Quinn
Yeah, it's okay. This is amazing. This is an incredible archive of letters found completely by chance by a local woman digging beside the Nile in the late 19th century. And it turns out that they are the kind of correspondence archive of the pharaoh Akhenaten and some of his father, some of his son as well. So Tell El Amarna was the capital of Akhenaten.
- [19:43]
William Duranpool
Akhenaten, we should say, was sometimes said to be the first monotheist, isn't he?
- [19:47]
Jo Quinn
He is sometimes said to be that yeah, he was certainly a very curious individual, but he's ruling in the late 14th century. He's also, as well as his interesting cultural pursuits, he's a very serious about empire as well.
- [19:59]
William Duranpool
He has a hot wife, Nefertiti.
- [20:02]
Jo Quinn
And he has a hot wife, Nefertiti. Exactly. He's a very, very interesting guy. Akhenaten, this archive, it's a real mixture. It's got a lot of letters from the other great kings of the era, the king of the Hittites, the king of the Babylonians and so on, which are kind of wonderful in themselves. People complaining about not getting RSVPs for parties and things. Amazing. But then there are the other set about, you know, half the correspondence is actually from Egypt's various vassal kings in the Levant. And they're asking the king for help, asking Pharaoh for help, or reporting their own news, or quite often reporting on each other, kind of jockeying the position with the pharaoh. And we don't actually seem to have any letters from Gaza in itself, though some of them, it's not clear quite where they're from. But Gaza is mentioned in some of these letters as Azatu and what it seems to be a kind of subordinate settlement then to another local king, probably Ashkelon, which is another major port to the north. We're not sure. But there are a lot of letters or several letters from the king of Gath in land, and that's going to become a very big philistine city in the next kind of the Iron Age, that they're very interesting because one of them mentions a rebellion of 30 towns under the control of this king of Gath. So you get the sense that cities like Gath, these relatively kind of small little city kingdoms, could be actually very substantial and have their own mini empires, even in this very early date. And in fact, archaeologists actually found Egyptian inscriptions at Gath from this period. So you kind of get it from both sides.
- [21:35]
William Duranpool
And is Gaza a colony or is it semi independent? What's it like? What's its position at the time of Telemanna?
- [21:41]
Anita Anand
Yeah. Does it govern itself or do the Egyptians just tell it what to do all the time?
- [21:44]
Jo Quinn
Well, I think what you can see over time is a sort of tightening of control. So in the early stages, the Egyptians basically want annual tribute. They want loyalty from the local kings and leaders in the southern Levant. But by the end of the Bronze Age, so kind of the next period after the Amarna letters, you can really talk, I think, in terms of an occupation, there's a network of Forts to protect the caravan routes and the copper mines and so on. So by the end of the period, it's quite a fortified region.
- [22:14]
William Duranpool
And then you get this thing which is very much at the heart of your most recent book, how the World Made the West, which is this fascinating period. And it's a bit like a sort of archaeological version of one of those sci fi films where there's some terrible catastrophe and there's only a bunch of people left on Lindisfarne or, or what's that film, 30 days after whatever it's the archaeological equivalent to that, the Bronze Age collapse. This is a period that you write so beautifully about where we see all these empires have been building up, all with scribes, all with administrations, nice little empires of their own. The whole lot are knocked in a sort of scattering of skittles in a few years. Tell us about this.
- [22:51]
Jo Quinn
Yeah, so this is a period of about a century or so around 1200 BCE which sees the collapse, or at least severe weakness, weakening of all the great powers of the Bronze Age, so including the Hittites, the Babylonians, the Mycenaean kingdoms in Greece and no one knows why. This is said as one of the great mysteries of antiquity. The theories from climate crisis to political rebellion, they all have some evidence in their favor. It's probably a mixture of all sorts of things. Best take on it to my mind is Eric Kleinz in his wonderful book 1170 where he says what the real problem was was the extent to which these enormous empires had come to depend on each other. We really see that in the Amarna letters. So a food shortage here or a pirate attack there could really quickly become a problem for everyone.
- [23:41]
William Duranpool
This is also the background to some people think to the Homeric Trojan wars, don't they? And sort of the idea of Odysseus going out in his boat and going around the Mediterranean, this is all this sort of world that is in collapse with warriors, seaborne warriors with lots of swords and shields turning up on the coast and making mischief of themselves.
- [24:00]
Jo Quinn
Yeah, absolutely. I mean, what we get in the Homeric epics is a sort of look back at what people then are imagining. This period was like three or 400 years earlier. But they actually include lots of stories that have just kind of been passed down through the period. So you do get a bit of a sense of what the era was like. And I think particularly in the Homeric ethics, you get a sense of, of the anxieties and fears. People who are away from home don't know if they're ever going to get back again, don't know what's happening in their absence. And that, I think, does capture something about the world. In this period, you use the word philistine.
- [24:33]
Anita Anand
And that, to me, just the word itself is fascinating because, you know, these days, it is a pejorative for somebody who doesn't have culture, who doesn't think about things. But it is part of this story, and it is the name given to a people. Now, I'm fascinated to know who were these people, because some describe them as if they're sort of warrior Vikings. Others describe them as if they're plundering pirates, who were the Philistines.
- [24:55]
Jo Quinn
Well, okay, so for this, we have to think ourselves into that era of the collapse of the Bronze Age. So Egypt hangs on longer than most of the other great kingdoms. But the Egyptian records we have from that period suggest this is a very difficult period for them as well. There are attacks on Egypt itself, rebellions in their occupied territories. And it's in all this turmoil that we first hear of these people that the Egyptians called Pelesecs somewhere in the Levant. And they're mentioned in this inscription on the great temple of Ramesses III at Luxor. And it describes this coalition of foreign factions who get together to attack Egypt in year eight of his own reign. And that's the year that's now probably 1177. That's the current thinking on that, 1177 BCE. And so the Peleset are one of these communities who form this coalition. There are several others, Luka, Sherden, Cheka, and so on. But one of these communities is called Peleset. And the inscription defines the coalition as a whole, as northerners and as foreigners. And it says they're conspiring on their islands. And it says. It also says they've been making attacks all over the eastern Mediterranean. It's not just Egypt. And some of the individual groups, though not actually the Peleset, are also described as coming from the sea. And that's where the modern concept of the Sea peoples comes from. It's a kind of modern extension to all these people of the label that the Egyptian inscriptions gave some of them. And now who these various communities really were, where they were from, it's very unclear. They may have been pirates of some kind. Maybe it was more of a regional political coalition. But they also turn up separately in various other documents from this era, not all of them Egyptian. So they're definitely a phenomenon that are taking up attention in this era.
- [26:42]
William Duranpool
Now, in this inscription that we mentioned Ramesses III mortuary temple at Medinet Habu in Thebes, the capital of Upper Egypt. You actually have pictures of these invaders of Egypt, is the perspective being given in these pictures. And they wear two sorts of different sort of hats, don't they? You can see them because some of them got feathered headdresses and the others have got horned helmets like sort of Vikings and Victorian picture books. And these guys, according to the inscription of Ramesses III at Medina, at Habu, are defeated by the Egyptians and sent packing. And there's a, there's a kind of very self congratulatory inscription saying their seed is not. Their heart and soul are finished forever and ever. And those who came forward together on the seas, the full flame in front of them at the Nile mouths, while a stockade of lances surrounded them on the shore, prostrated on the beach, slain and were made into heaps of corpses from head to tail. So that's the first time we find these Peleset or Philistines or the word, which then evolves into Palestinians being mentioned and they're already being massacred. There's corpses from head to tail in the very first description that we have them. But the important point is that despite this inscription, they don't disappear. They aren't erased from history. They continue. And in the next half, we're gonna see what the Hebrew Bible has to say about these controversial Philistines.
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Anita Anand
Welcome back. So just before the break, William was telling us about how this description of a massacre of the people who we would now call Palestinians, who then were called the Philistines, so they don't disappear from the record despite this horrific fate that meets them. And they do turn up in the Bible. And here they are described, I think Joe Wright in saying is, you know, people who live in that, that coastal plain, the four books of the Bible that discuss them, they don't speak about them in complementary terms at all. I mean, they are sort of denigrated, if you like, untutored, barbaric. And that's why, I mean, when we started talking about this, you know, in that term philistine, it's a pejorative. Even today, it's a pejorative. So let's just look at what happened in the Bible and how they enter biblical text.
- [31:07]
William Duranpool
So I think there are three blocks of stories in the early books of the Old Testament that mention the Philistines. And maybe if I give a precis of each one and then throw it to Joe.
- [31:17]
Anita Anand
To Joe. Yeah, great idea.
- [31:19]
William Duranpool
This is taking me right back to my early Bible classes. The monks taught me my school, Good Catholic boy.
- [31:25]
Anita Anand
This is what you need, right? Go for it.
- [31:27]
Jo Quinn
Exactly.
- [31:28]
William Duranpool
Anyway, so the first appearance is in the book of Genesis. And in Genesis, chapter 21, verse 34, they talk about the patriarch Abraham residing in the land of the Philistines. So you get the impression in this verse, certainly, that the Philistines are there, and patriarch Abraham, who is obviously the father of all the three monotheistic religions, Islam, Judaism, and Christianity, all look back to the patriarch Abraham. So, Joe, take us through that. How does he appear in the patriarchal early text of the Bible?
- [32:02]
Jo Quinn
Sure. Okay, so we're in the very earliest part of the story of the Hebrews here. This is before the exodus to Egypt. And Abraham is originally from the city of Ur in Mesopotamia, modern Iraq. Yeah. So his God Yahweh persuades him to move his family west of the Jordan to what the Bible calls the land of Canaan. And he promises a land there to him and his descendants. And this is the great kind of starting point for the whole story. Then when he arrives, he finds a local king called Abimelech. And Abimelech is both called the king of Gerar in the Bible specific city quite near Gaza. And he's also called King of the Philistines. And it's actually quite the odd story. So Abraham's cover story is that his wife Sarah is actually his sister sister. So this Philistine king believes it's safe to take her for his own. But then Abraham's God comes to the king in a dream, and he explains that actually Sarah's already married and that he, the king, will die unless he restores her to Abraham and makes amends. So the king basically calls Abraham in and asked what he was playing at. And Abraham says, oh, I thought I'd find godless people here who would kill me in order to get hold of my wife. So we decided to call each other brother and sister sister instead, which doesn't sound like a great deal for Sarah, but there we are. He also explains that she is in fact, his half sister. But anyway, Abimelech, the Philistine king, gives her back straight away as soon as he hears this. And he also gives Abraham silver and cattle and enslaved people, and he tells him he can settle wherever he likes in his land. So, two things here. One is that Abimelech actually comes out of the story pretty well. And the other one is that he's already there. The Philistines are already there when Abraham turns up.
- [33:43]
William Duranpool
And that we will go into this later, but of course, has political repercussions today. And we'll go into that later. Lodge that. Put a little bookmark in at that idea. Okay, so the second story, please let.
- [33:53]
Anita Anand
Me channel Sister Francesca Just for a moment, can I tell you? The second story is Samson and Delilah. Samson is presented as sort of the strong man of the Israelites and Delilah as a Philistine woman. This story has been done and redone in popular culture again and again and again. Samson's birth heralded by an angel who says he's going to be consecrated to God from the womb, and he shall begin to save Israel from the hand of the Philistines. And that is in the Book of Judges. However, things don't go as planned, do they, Jo? What happens in the 16th chapter of the Book of Judges in the Hebrew Bible?
- [34:30]
Jo Quinn
Yeah, so, right, so the Israelites have now gone to Egypt, come back again, and the Philistines are still there. When they get back, Samson is the last of these Israelite judges, or kind of generals before the Israelites have kings. And he's famously strong. Right. He can slay a lion with his bare hands. He massacres an entire Philistine army with the jawbone of a donkey. As often, the story's really quite weird because Samson isn't doing this as part of a religious crusade. He isn't really doing it on behalf of the Israelites. He's doing it as a kind of personal campaign against people he thinks have insulted him, usually in the area of women. And so he's not a very heroic figure in the Bible. But crucially, he has this incredible strength, and it depends on this vow that he's taken or his parents have taken to the Hebrew God never to cut his hair. And then this is the story. He falls for this Philistine woman, Delilah, and with the help of a bribe from some local Philistine officials, she works out what his secret is. She gets a servant to cut his hair off while he's asleep, and then she turns him over to the Philistine officials. And now they've got no problem gouging his eyes out.
- [35:43]
William Duranpool
Hence the phrase eyeless in Gaza.
- [35:45]
Jo Quinn
Yeah, I mean, the foolish thing they do is they leave it at that. And they then sort of put him in prison. They put him to work, actually, in Gaza, in the city of Gaza. They sent him to Gaza and put him to work milling grain for them there. And, of course, his hair begins to grow again. So one day they take him out to their temple, the temple of their God, Dagon, and they want to make him dance for the Philistines, which he does. You know, he's humiliated, but then he leans against a pillar as if he needs it for support because he's so weak now. And then he pulls the entire temple down on himself and his, his tormentors. And it's the equivalent of a kind of suicide bombing effectively. But he again, he doesn't seem to be motivated by religion, I mean very much by revenge at this point and more generally at this point in the Bible, the relations between the invading Israelites, the local Philistines are definitely on the downturn.
- [36:34]
William Duranpool
Right. And it gets worse because the third story, again very famous story that's been retold and told a million times. There are pictures and operas and so on about this is the story of David and Goliath.
- [36:47]
Anita Anand
Michelangelo, statues, I mean he's been done again and again. He's on aprons, he's everywhere. Remind us of the story of David and Goliath.
- [36:58]
William Duranpool
WILLIAM so David and Goliath is the story that Goliath, who's from Gath, which is this town that Joe mentioned earlier, which is this big philistine city on the border with the Israelites. Israelites are up in the hills in Jerusalem and in Judea and Gath is the nearest sort of philistine stronghold to them. And there's a whole lot of stuff which goes on. First of all there's the battle of Ebenezer which is sometimes said to take around 1050 B.C. when the Philistines crush the Israelites, destroy their capital at Shiloh and capture the Ark of the Covenant, the sacred symbol of Yahweh, and the Israelites most sacred object, which of course is what the first Indiana Jones movie was all about, trying to refine the Ark of the Covenant. Anyway, it's carried off to another philistine city called Ashdod by Goliath. And Goliath is the Philistines massive champion. And he's got armor, he's this big strong guy. The Philistines advance into the hill country and the Israelites produce a military commander, Saul, but he's afraid to do battle. And it's at this point that David appears and David has a slingshot and he's just a little boy, he's a shepherd boy. And he takes these smooth pebbles and takes on Goliath single handed and he puts a slingshot straight between his eyes and that's the end of Goliath.
- [38:13]
Anita Anand
This was the origin of the smote for me, you know, the five smooth pebbles from the brook and then he smote him. What do we take away from this? Jo?
- [38:21]
Jo Quinn
Couple of things. So one of the things is that Goliath, I mean he's not so much a bad man, he's just very tall and not an Israelite. And it is this interesting thing that often the detail of the Bible stories is much less kind of black and white and binary than the way that sort of people remember it. The idea of the Philistine is totally uncultured and so on. I mean, that doesn't come out of a sort of detailed, nuanced reading of all the stories in the Bible about Philistine Palestine. That's a general kind of beer broad, paintbrush idea. And that's a kind of shame in a way, because some of the detail is great. And the story of David and Goliath, I think one of the things that's really interesting here is that it's set up as an epic conflict. But we have to remember this is all very local. It's fewer than 50km from Gath, which is the hometown of Goliath, to Jerusalem, where David later rules as king. And of course, it's in the nature of the Hebrew Bible to big up the events concerned, particularly big up its own heroes and so on. But this is all. This is local social drama, really. I mean, if it was on TV now we're looking sort of Call the Midwife kind of scale.
- [39:28]
Anita Anand
I mean, did the stories check out archaeologically as well? Can you look at the archaeological record and say, oh, yeah, no. I mean, look, we know that there was this place in Ashdod. We know that Ashkelon was like. I mean, can you place the story in the realm historic record?
- [39:42]
Jo Quinn
Yeah, you usually can. So, I mean, the Bible's a big sprawling collection of all sorts of different things, right? There's poems, there's stories, there's legal texts, there's archival things. And it's all relating to kind of past and present of the Israelite kingdoms. And the present is probably in the 7th or 6th century BCE when it's all being kind of collated. That's very controversial, but that's a less controversial view than some. And the thing about the historical part is they aren't supposed to be a scholarly history, but they're a kind of origin story, like stories of Trojan War or stories of King Arthur in Britain. It's a way of kind of explaining the way we live. And it's not science fiction. So these cities really did exist. It's based on real places. It's written in the real places. The kingdoms of Judah and Israel really existed. The Philistines, five Philistine cities it talks about, talks about, really exist. Even some of the individuals turn up in inscriptions from the right Period and so on.
- [40:38]
William Duranpool
David's finally turned up, hasn't he? The people were looking for him for years and now, definitely, unequivocally, he was historical.
- [40:45]
Jo Quinn
The House of David. Yeah, the House of David, yeah. I think the way to look at it is, you know, King Solomon may have existed, we don't know, but he probably didn't live with 700 wives and 300 concubines. There's this bigger sense in which it sets up for the storytelling aspect. It sets up these dichotomies between large groups, you know, us, the Israelites, them, the Philistines and so on. That doesn't necessarily reflect the way people actually living in the era it's talking about, you know, four or 500 years beforehand, actually saw what was going on.
- [41:17]
Anita Anand
Yeah, I mean, look, this entire era that we're living in is one of febrile contest and argument. And even the archaeological record, it's. Is hotly debated at the moment. So there was a recent controversial report that said Philistines were foreigners, they weren't people of the land, that they were from Greece. It was tweeted, I think, by the Israeli Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu. Then it was critiqued by Israeli archaeologists who said, no, you don't know what you're talking about. I mean, what do we know is fact and what has developed as noise over whether they were people of the land or people who came from the Aegean to the land?
- [41:55]
William Duranpool
This is what we'd love you to clarify, Joe, because there's quite a lot of early accounts, particularly from the kind of 1950s, 1960s, which, which assume that the Philistines are from the Aegean and you see a lot of that, but you do not believe that. Do you think that they are local, really what the Bible says too?
- [42:11]
Jo Quinn
Quite clearly, I don't know where they're from. Personally. I don't think we've got enough evidence to say that they aren't local or indeed that they aren't not local. I think it's very interesting the way that modern scholars have persisted for a long time, a lot of modern scholars, in seeing these Philistines or Peleset, as sea peoples, which is what they're almost, but not quite called in the, in the Egyptian sources and seeing them as outsiders. But this, this idea really, it comes from the late 19th century. It's this theory of the Philistines as invaders or perhaps refugees from usually the Aegean, but from somewhere north, tied up.
- [42:50]
William Duranpool
Sometimes to the Trojan War in some early victorious.
- [42:52]
Jo Quinn
Absolutely, absolutely. And it's. And it's all coming out of this era when a lot of Europeans are very concerned about the threat of invasion. We're basically talking about the aftermath of the Franco Prussian War. We're talking about the years leading up to the First World War. So this is not an unreasonable thing to be preoccupied with. It sort of seeps into the way they see the ancient world from what we know about these people from contemporary sources, which are, of course, you know, very, very scarce. Some of them may have been from elsewhere in the Mediterranean. So there's a group called the Luka, which are very plausibly associated with Lycia in southern Turkey, for example. Others might have been in the Levant all along. They might have been returning home from perhaps trading or piratical careers that didn't work out so well during the collapse of the Bronze Age, when trading kind of collapses as well. Some of them are definitely on the Levantine coast in sources from the 14th century. We don't have that for the Pelesant themselves. Ramesses inscription, the one we were talking about, that doesn't only describe a sea battle between the Egyptians and these invaders. It also talks about a land battle against people which do include the Peleset in a place called Jahi, which is another Egyptian word for the Levant. And that's got illustrations too. And it shows warriors, but it also shows their families in ox drawn wagons. So it suggests a kind of revenge attack on people in their own home, because they're not going to be taking their families on an invasion campaign with them. So there's all sorts of suggestions that they are, at least by the 12th century, some of these Peleset or Philistines are in the Levant.
- [44:29]
Anita Anand
Can I ask you though? I mean, you know, with all that nuance and all of that, you know, couching, and we still have so much yet to know. Can we say, though, in this period, the late Bronze Age, that you have an Israelite identity and a palacet Palestinian Philistine identity, that these are crystallizing at that time?
- [44:49]
Jo Quinn
Well, what you can say is that along with the collapse of the Bronze Age, collapse of Bronze Age power, you get this incredible proliferation of new polities and peoples and identities and so on all across the Levant. It's not just Philistines and Israelites, it's also Ammonites, Edomites, all sorts of things. And another problem is that we often don't have people's own words for the way they see themselves from this early period. We never have that for the Philistines. So you have to look for clues that people are forming some form of communal identity or affiliation. And one possibility in terms of the Philistines is that the archaeology shows that the Philistine sites tend to have quite a large proportion of, of pig bones. Pork is very popular in a lot of these sites and perhaps that's just the fashion, perhaps that's just a preference. One of the theories is that that actually shows people distinguishing themselves from their next door neighbours, in this case the Israelites. And of course, you know, traditionally pork is prescribed in the Israelite tradition and doesn't turn up to any extent in the archaeology. So I think that you can maybe see some people who are saying we are not like our neighbors. What they are positively considering themselves to be is really hard to say. And in general, in antiquity, most people identify on the level, on a much smaller level than we would consider today. So the city, their clan, maybe a particular God who only belongs to a small group of people and so on. So it's a problem for sort of looking back at the ancient history of what we would now call ethnic groups. Oops.
- [46:30]
William Duranpool
Let's move on to the biggest excavation of a Philistine site, which is Gath, which is the home of Goliath. And two interesting things seem to have come out lately from what I've read in the Israeli newspapers. Well, first of all, they seem to take a lot of hallucinogenics, which is one.
- [46:48]
Anita Anand
How do they find that out? I'm just, I'm just intrigued. How do they know that?
- [46:51]
William Duranpool
Because the botany survives in the archaeological record. You've got these hallucinogenic which have been turning up. But the other thing which is very clear in the recent excavations at Gath is that Gath is a lot bigger than anything that's going on up in Jerusalem. So while we have this very full Israelite point of view given in successive books of the Bible, all of which not only surviving, but in every language of the world for centuries. The Philistines, who have left very little writing, or almost no writing, have bigger cities and actually, contrary to their reputation of being Philistine, are actually quite sophisticated.
- [47:26]
Jo Quinn
Yeah, absolutely. I mean, Gath is a very kind of big metropolis. It's about four times larger than contemporary Jerusalem. It's the largest Philistine city that we know and it goes back to the Bronze Age. So again, the city, wherever the Philistines came from, the city they're living in then is an old Bronze Age city. It's got lots of this new Greek and Cypriot style pottery. We've been Talking about, it's got very substantial fortifications, monumental gates, a lot of olive oil production in the city. And one thing that's really interesting is there's a lot of evidence for exchange with the Judean Kingdom and with Jerusalem itself. So Gath is on the road from the port to Ashkelon up to Jerusalem. And so any fish or that kind of thing that's being imported in Jerusalem is coming through Gath. So relations, you know, obviously the Bible's going to concentrate on the exciting bits of the story and the conflict and so on, but there's also this sort of day to day story where, you know, people are trading partners.
- [48:22]
William Duranpool
But you mentioned conflict. And at the end, at the top layers of the archaeology of Gath, we get this line of black charcoal of burning. And that's what we're going to be dealing with in the next episode when Joe is going to be coming back and telling us about what happened to these Philistine cities. Because things get a bit darker in the next centuries to come. As if it's not dark enough already. A lot of smiting going on.
- [48:48]
Anita Anand
So till the next time we meet, it's goodbye from me, Anita Anand, and.
- [48:52]
William Duranpool
Goodbye from me, William Durample.
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Here we have the Limu Emu in.
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Fascinating.
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Jo Quinn
Limu is that guy with the binoculars watching us.
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William Duranpool
Cut the camera. They see us.
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Anita Anand
Talk soon.
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