Philistia

The Egyptian name of the Philistines, conventionally read Peleset, written prs.t with the determinative of a foreign land. It appears in the great inscriptions of Ramesses III at Medinet Habu, which record his repulse, in the eighth year of his reign (c. 1175 BCE), of a coalition of Sea Peoples who had come “from the midst of the sea,” the Peleset named foremost among them. These reliefs are the earliest dated attestation of the people anywhere.

The Egyptian form is the headwater of the whole Peleset family. It catches the Philistines at the very moment of their arrival, as raiders and migrants beaten back from the Delta and, the archaeology suggests, settling instead on the Canaanite coast just to the north. From that coastal settlement the name passed into Hebrew as Pᵊlešet, into Assyrian as Palaštu, and, by the Greek generalization, into Palaistínē and at last the modern name of the land. It begins here, as the label of a defeated sea-raider on a Theban temple wall.

The Hebrew name Pᵊlešet, the coastal territory of the Pᵊlištîm, the Philistines, Israel’s perennial rivals along the southern shore, whose five cities, Gaza, Ashkelon, Ashdod, Ekron, and Gath, dominate the books of Judges and Samuel. The Philistines were not Semites but one of the Sea Peoples who settled the coast around 1200 BCE, and the Bible preserves a memory of their foreignness, deriving them from Kaftor, Crete.

Pᵊlešet in the Hebrew is a narrow thing, the coastal strip of a hostile neighbor, never the whole land. Its outsized future was an accident of Greek geography: when Herodotus and his successors took the name and applied it, as Palaistínē, to the entire region between Phoenicia and Egypt, the small Philistine Pᵊlešet became the seed of a name for the whole country. The word that the Hebrew used for its enemies on the coast would, through Greek, end as the name of the land itself.

The Assyrian name of the Philistine coast, Palaštu (also Pilištu), in the records of the kings who taxed and campaigned along the Levantine shore in the eighth and seventh centuries. Adad-nirari III lists Palaštu among the western lands rendering tribute, and the great conquerors who followed reduced the Philistine cities one by one, deporting and resettling as they went.

Palaštu is the Mesopotamian witness to the name, midway in form and time between the Egyptian Peleset of the Sea Peoples’ arrival and the Greek Palaistínē of the geographers. It confirms the continuity of the coastal name across the centuries between, the same people and the same shore recorded by Egypt, Israel, and Assyria in turn. The Philistine name was current in three of the great archival traditions of the ancient Near East before the Greeks ever generalized it into the name of a land.

The Greek name Palaistínē, taken from the Semitic Pᵊlešet of the Philistine coast but applied far more widely. Herodotus repeatedly speaks of “Syria called Palaistínē,” using the name for the whole stretch of coast from Phoenicia to the border of Egypt, the Philistine territory and much besides. It is the decisive widening: a name for one people’s narrow shore becomes, in Greek usage, the name of a broad region.

This generalization is the hinge of the Peleset family’s history. The Egyptians, Hebrews, and Assyrians had all used the name for the Philistines specifically; Herodotus and the Greek geographers stretched it to the land at large, and that broadened sense is the one that survived. Through the Latin Palaestina and the Roman province built on it, the Greek Palaistínē became the basis of the region’s name down to the present. The Philistines themselves were long gone; their name, enlarged once by Greek convenience, outlived them by millennia.

The Latin name Palaestina, taken from the Greek; Pliny uses it for the southern part of the Syrian coast. Its decisive moment came when the emperor Hadrian, after crushing the Bar Kokhba revolt around 135 CE, renamed the province of Iudaea as Syria Palaestina, attaching the old Philistine coastal name to the whole country in an act with a clear political edge, the erasure of Iudaea from the map.

Through this Roman province the name was fixed permanently on the land. Palaestina passed into the medieval and modern European languages as the standard name of the region, and into Arabic as Filasṭīn; the form Herodotus had loosely applied to “Syria called Palaistine” became, by imperial decree, an administrative reality. The journey that began with a sea-raider on an Egyptian temple wall ends with a Roman province, the name of one vanished people made the name of a land by the empire that ruled it.

The Arabic name of the region, Filasṭīn, continuing the Roman Palaestina; after the Islamic conquests of the 630s it became the name of a military district, the Jund Filasṭīn, one of the subdivisions of greater Syria, with its capital first at Lydda and then at Ramla. The geographers al-Balādhurī and Yāqūt use it as the established name of the southern Levant.

Filasṭīn is the last station in the long descent of the Philistine name. From Egyptian Peleset to Hebrew Pᵊlešet, Assyrian Palaštu, Greek Palaistínē, and Latin Palaestina, the word passed through five of the great languages of antiquity before reaching Arabic, broadening once, under the Greeks, from a people to a land and never narrowing again. The Sea People that an Egyptian pharaoh recorded driving back from his coast left, as its only lasting monument, a name that has stayed fixed on the same shore for three thousand years.