[wildbill]

Take a look at the dating of the Trojan War and the appearance of the Sea Peoples in Egypt and the Phillistines along the coast near the old kingdom of the Israelites.

All these events occurred around 1200 B. C..

I don’t believe this is a coincidence. These colonizing events could easily be the result of a migration of Greeks outward and beyond the Aegean arm of the Mediterranean. Another theory is that this represents an escape of the Trojans and their allies from invading Greeks from the European mainland.

One recent archeological paper in the online Journal of Science sets the return of Odysseus to Ithaca to April 16, 1178 B.C. The researchers used references in the the Odyssey to known astrological occurences as clues for their conclusions. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2008/06/23/odysseus-return-date-from_n_108765.html

I think I’ll post the article as it may have general interest past this particular thread.

[Cronos]

thanks, please ping sunkenciv and blam and me to this! maybe even odds would like it

[Siena Dreaming]

I thought I read that the very word "Philistine" could very well be of Greek origin (Phil-Hestia...love of the hearth or Goddess of the hearth Hestia).

[Quis Custodiet]

If I recall correctly archaeologists are pretty sure that the Doric Greeks (most famously the Spartans) and the Hebrew Philistines were descended from the same people the Egyptian inscriptions of Ramses III victories call “the Sea people”

[SunkenCiv]

The date of the Trojan War is fixed by internal references in the Iliad, and by the archaeology, to the 9th c BC, not the 13th.

http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/chat/1202723/posts?page=6#6
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/news/1623102/posts?page=11#11
http://www.varchive.org/dag/cevil.htm
http://www.varchive.org/dag/index.htm