UPI / BARCROFT IMAGES Bones believed to belong to ancient Philistines have been uncovered in the port city of Ashkelon, Israel
The word “Palestine” actually refers to the Philistines .. a coastal people who , according to the books of Judges and Kings, opposed the development of the ancient state that was to become Judea and Israel. In the Bible, the Philistines are depicted as the ancient Israelites’ archenemy, a foreign people who migrated from lands to the west and settled in five main cities in Philistia, in today’s southern Israel and the Gaza Strip. The most famous Philistine is, of course, Goliath. David became the founding king of Judea’s Davidic Dynasty by killing Goliath.
Some 1000 years later, the Philistines were long gone. After the destruction of the Jewish Kingdom by Rome in 70 CE, the Romans renamed the area “Palestine” in an effort to erase the Jewish identity by identifying the land with a people who had been long gone, replaced and conquered by Jews, Arabs, Egyptians, Syrians, Babyylinians, Persians, Greeks and others.
The actual people, the first “Palestinians” are an enduring biblical mystery because very little biological trace of them had been found.
The first traces emerged in 2013 during an excavation of the biblical city of Ashkelon. Since then, the team says it has uncovered the remains of more than 200 people there.
The team is now performing DNA, radiocarbon and other tests on bone samples uncovered at the cemetery, dating back to between the 11th and the 8th centuries B.C., to help resolve a debate about the Philistines’ geographical origins.
The archaeologists kept the discovery a secret for three years until the end of their dig because of a unique hazard of archaeology in modern-day Israel: they did not want to attract ultra-Orthodox Jewish protesters. “We had to bite our tongues for a long time,” the leader of the dig said.
Finds from the cemetery went on display in July at the Rockefeller Archaeological Museum in Jerusalem.