Is this Goliath’s burial site? First-ever Philistine cemetery discovered

The discovery of the first ever Philistine cemetery outside the walls of the biblical city of Ashkelon in Israel may finally help “unlock the secrets” of the origins of the ancient Philistines.

An archeologist cleans a Philistine skull uncovered in a groundbreaking discovery of the first Philistine cemetery found in the Philistine port city of Ashkelon, Israel, June 28, 2016.

Excavation at the site of the newly discovered Philistine cemetery, particularly in areas where the burials were undisturbed (not reused or looted in antiquity), allows archaeologists and scholars to begin constructing a picture of the typical grave goods buried with the Philistines.

The team is now busy performing DNA tests on bone samples, dating back to between the 11th and the 8th centuries B.C., AP reported.

Hailed as the “crowning achievement” of the decades-long dig, Daniel Master said it was an opportunity to finally see the Philistines “face to face”. The origins of this “sea people” – a term also used to describe their Phoenician contemporaries – remain a mystery. It was significantly larger than cities inland during the Bronze and Iron Age, with 10-12,000 people, because it could sustain greater population through commerce.

It is the first discovery of a Philistine burial place in excavations that go back a century.

In the cemetery, the researchers found pottery and other artifacts along with the remains of more than 200 men, women, and children that give clues to how the Philistines, known as rivals of the Israelites that sent forth Goliath, lived.

“The victors write history”, Master said.

“There have been other random finds of people caught in Philistine destruction on occasion”, he added, “but nothing like this”. They were thought to be the worst of the worst.

Beyond the previously scanty archaeological record, the Philistines are known mostly from the Old Testament account given by their neighbours and bitter enemies, the ancient Israelites.

Scholars, who study the ancient Mediterranean, have always been puzzled by the elusive origins of the Philistines.

The Leon Levy Expedition, led by Lawrence E. Stager of Harvard University, has been conducting large-scale excavations on the tell of ancient Ashkelon since 1985, thanks to the support of Leon Levy and Shelby White of NY. During the reign of Ramesses III, hordes of seaborne people bore down on the kingdom, were thwarted by the Egyptian armies and settled along the Levantine coast.

While theories abound as to where, exactly, the Philistine settlers came from – and how, exactly, they made their trip – no one really knows for sure.

Fox also said that unlike some of their neighbors and predecessors, such as the Canaanites, the Philistines did not practice secondary burial, which is the moving of skeletons to make room for another body in the tomb or grave.

“Based on their teeth, you can see they have had a hard life, there are lines that indicate a growth interruption, probably a starvation or severe fever in infancy, we also see that in their bones they were hard workers, they practiced inbreeding and they used their teeth as tools, probably for weaving”, argues Sherry Fox, a archaeologist specialized in the analysis of remains.