Thanks Red Badger, Cronos, and wildbill for the pings, and, uh, oh-oh, I think I owe thanks to SJackson for posting one of *those* topics. :')
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Posted on 07/08/2011 5:19:43 AM PDT by SJackson
TEL EL-SAFI, Israel At the remains of an ancient metropolis in southern Israel, archaeologists are piecing together the history of a people remembered chiefly as the bad guys of the Hebrew Bible.
The city of Gath, where the annual digging season began this week, is helping scholars paint a more nuanced portrait of the Philistines, who appear in the biblical story as the perennial enemies of the Israelites.
Close to three millennia ago, Gath was on the frontier between the Philistines, who occupied the Mediterranean coastal plain, and the Israelites, who controlled the inland hills. The city's most famous resident, according to the Book of Samuel, was Goliath - the giant warrior improbably felled by the young shepherd David and his sling.
The Philistines "are the ultimate other, almost, in the biblical story," said Aren Maeir of Bar-Ilan University, the archaeologist in charge of the excavation.
(Excerpt) Read more at charlotteobserver.com ...
The accounts I’ve read only say they were Greek as a general description of a “sea people” of “Aegean origin”. I’ve read that some people link them to the Myceneans but I’ve not read a study that clearly links them with such a specific group. Late Helladic IIIC pottery is said to link them and if that’s true I’d like to read the research.
I was wrong — Santorini blew in 1700 BC, so these wouldn’t have been Cretans there. These could have only been Myceneans or Hittites. But since the Myceneans were sea-farers while the Hittites weren’t, we’re left with only the Myceneans as the Sea peoples, imho
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.
thanks, please ping sunkenciv and blam and me to this! maybe even odds would like it
I tried to post the article on the astronomical paper about the return of Odysseus—but got a censorship notice that articles from the Huffington Post aren’t welcome and could not be posted on FR.
Although I have been a member of FR for so long that I no longer remember my first login date, and although I am firmly in the conservative-leaning Libertarian camp, I am brought up short by the inflexible spirit of Know-nothingness that is exposed here, eg. no individual consideration of acceptable material or academic freedom where ideas can be explored.
Which brings me to the question. Does GGG deserve its own site? Is GGG really suited to a site dedicated to political ideological purity? Or am i over-reacting?
i wonder how much Mycenean Greek had diverged from Indo-European base by that time
it does, but we try to bring “individual consideration of history” to the masses :)
I’ve always heard that Palestine was a Roman word indicating “land of the Philistines”. Over time that word may be very different than what it was originally.
Narrow-interest sites with sporadic postings don't last.
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”
You’re right. But it took me an hour or so to run it down and post it.
Of course that begs the questions of:
(a) whether the entire academic paper, as opposed to a popularized interpretational article will hold the interests of casual readers and
(b) what possible political contamination could occur to the faithful readers of FR articles, simply by virtue of the fact that a completely apolitical article happened to be posted on an ‘enemy’ website.
I understand when publications don’t permit copyrighted articles to be posted on FR and they are forbidden by agreement.
But establishing a blacklist of organizations that are left-leaning without regard to the content of individual articles but to the organiation alone seems to be a slippery slope? When will articles from the BBC, CBS, ABC or Wikipedia or many left-leaning newspapers like the Houston Chronicle (who aren’t banned by legal agreements) be similarly placed on a list of forbidden organizations?
The problem is that there are literally thousands of enemy media and the moderators can’t know them all so its possible for seditious material to sneak its way in to FR anyway.
I guess my libertarian views that inform my argument on this issue are predicated on a tenet of the college I attended long ago. I believe in “Man’s right to knowledge and the free use thereof.”
O ye of little faith! How dare you accuse our fearless leader of GGG to be a sporadic poster after all the work he does to bring every posted article of interest to our attention?
I wonder if a site open to the entire internet world might actually pick up more regular readers world-wide.
Of course, to entice the new readership, our fearless leader might require me to leave off with my mammoth rants and puns.
Some (most?) freepers have trouble reading the academic papers but I think a link for those willing to try one is good. The popular articles will be read by more people but then you run into the problem of the posting rules. It’s Jim’s site, it’s Jim’s rules. I don’t blame him for not wanting to give hits to a leftwing site from FR. That’s how many of them make money.
To post here, just make a commitment to find blogs and such that comment on science articles if you want somebody else’s commentary otherwise make up your own. It’ll probably be just as good.
However, "Philistine" looks like it could be of Greek origin to me defined as I mentioned earlier.
Although I’m reasonably bright, I haven’t the time to locate academic papers that may be interesting to the GGG group on FR and write up popularized summarys.
As far as not wanting to give “hits” to left-wing sites, that is balderdash. What about the call from FR conservative activists that often goes out to ‘freep” a perceived enemy site?
The definition of “to freep”, after all, is to visit another website with the objective of registering opposition to the prevailing viewpoint on that site.
Sort of a ‘do as I say and not as I do’ mentality, eh?
It’s probably a matter of copyright complaint, but occasionally I’ve seen the “not welcome here” message for various (usually new to me) sources. There’s probably a huge-assed lawsuit accumulating because of the selective enforcement of the copyrights — IOW, FR gets targeted by the scummy leftwing thugs, who then leave alone the other violators. It’s easy to find the evidence — just look at any pulled topic (if it was around long enough, it’ll be in the Google cache or the Web Archive) or do a search on the title, find the original source, and along with it find the many, many other places on the web where its excerpted (or posted in entire).
But anyway, I don’t worry my pretty little head about such things. And I don’t worry my real one either. ;’)
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
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