Re: Just Joined, got lots of questions -help?

Hello,
on the subject of the Philistines:
the Bible says they had come from Crete (Kaphtor) to the Levantine coast.
The end of the thirteenth century saw a lot of moving peoples in the eastern
Mediterranean, but only the Egyptians, seeing themselves threatened by those
sea-farers from the North, wrote down their names. The Philistines are
usually seen as the people called 'Peleset', one of those trying to invade
Egypt from the East at around 1190 BC (during the reign of Ramses III).
The one strange thing that might at some time in the future prove to be a
linguistic link is the way the Peleset - warriors are painted in the temple
of Ramses III at Medinet Habu. Their headgear looks like upright feathers
slightly spread in the form of a fan and has for this reason be paralleled
with the sign no. 2 of the famous Cretan Phaistos Disc depicting a man with
exactly that kind of thing on his head. Well, may be we'll live to see...
The languages found in the region of Palestine (name deriving from
Philistines) are, as far as I know, all of the Western-Semitic kind. But
actual connections between Western Galilee and the Minoan world before the
end of the 17th cent. BC have been proven in excavations at Tel Kabri.
Archaeologists found a painted floor with a typically Aegean decoration.
(cf. W-D. Niemeier, New Archaeological Evidence for a 17th Century Date of
the 'Minoan Eruption from Israel (Tel Kabri, Western Galilee), in: Thera and
the Aegean World III/3, Lond. 1990. There is also another article by
Niemeier you might want to have a look at on this subject, Brent: The
Mycenaeans in Western Anatolia and the Problem of the origins of the Sea
Peoples, in: Mediterranean Peoples in Transition, eds. Gitin/Mazar/Stern,
Jerusalem 1998. This article contains a beautiful summary of all the
theories made for the sea peoples since the beginning of the centuries and
give you an idea of how much the early Greeks (Mycenaeans, i.e. Achaians,
not Dorians etc.) had to do in the region at that time.
Greetings from Crete
Sabine