thank you Sunkenciv!
That ‘medallion’ looks to me like the discs used on bridles of chariot horses. They were used right at the end of the bit to put pressure on the horse’s mouth to turn right or left. The projections were inward. You can see photos of them in David Gregory’s book.
Weren’t the original Gazan people thought to be a group of Indo-European steppe people that penetrated the middle east?
By the time of the later Israelite monarchy, the Philistines appear to have been Hurrian (based on surviving local info); apparently they hadn’t been during the time of the Judges (in the OT, 40 years of Philistine domination; the Samson/Shamgar story; David vs Goliath). The Philistines were *not* the “People of the Sea”.
Neal Bierling’s “Giving Goliath His Due” is back online (the old site fell off, and I’m getting errors trying to load the Wayback Machine versions) — wrote this in chapter 5:
[snip] The name Goliath, like Achish, is not Semitic, but rather Anatolian (McCarter 1980, 291, Mitchell 1967, 415; Wainwright 1959, 79). Not all agree though; the International Standard Bible Encyclopedia (2:524) proposes that Goliath may have been a remnant of one of the aboriginal groups of giants of Palestine who now were in the employ of the Philistines. [1. Naveh (1985, 9, 13 n. 14) states that Ikausu, the name of the king of Ekron in the seventh century b.c., is a non-Semitic name that can be associated with that of the Achish of Gath in David’s time. The name in the seventh century has a shin ending that is non-West Semitic.] [/snip]