You are right. I believe I confused Phoenicians and philistines and was meaning Phoenicians. The link below is a very long and fascinating account of the Phoenician history and role in the affairs of the eastern Mediterranean. One thing I had not known was that Phoenicia served as Persia’s navy in a number of ways including wars with Greece.
https://phoenicia.org/history.html
I would expect that aside from building and furnishings that wood was essential for cooking, warm bathing, and if there was a cool season, for house warming. Even brick or adobe houses often use timber as cross pieces in the roof. Looking at images for Harappa, the roofs are long since fallen away, but looking at mud construction for north African cities like Timbuctu, wooden cross beams are evident.
If memory serves, the Aryans' arrival in the Harappan cities was that of a people on the move, and everywhere they went they found empty habitations or whole populations lying dead.
During Alexander the Great's siege of Tyre the Tyrians were out on their island, and basically told him to sod off. He set his engineers to work building two big breakwaters and then filling the center area in, then attacked the city on dry land. The reason the island isn't obvious today is, it hasn't been an island since that siege. The Phoenicians hit their maritime height after the foundation of Carthage; the all-season port had a military core where their considerable fleet of warships could be launched one after the other, one ship every few seconds. As part of the expansion into the Med, Africa had been circumnavigated and colonies planted along the Atlantic coast at least as far south as Cameroon (Mt Cameroon is the only recent active volcano, and its eruption is clearly described in the Pariplus of Hanno). The 'history' given on Phoenicia.org is a scrambled mess, thanks to reliance on the conventional pseudochronology. :^)