Philistia

Philistia refers to the territory inhabited by the Philistines in Canaan, where they maintained a pentapolis comprising the cities of Gaza, Ashkelon, Ashdod, Ekron, and Gath. For a time, Philistia also included Jaffa, which may have briefly changed hands with Israel before it was ultimately lost to the Neo-Assyrian Empire during Sennacherib's Levantine campaign.

Scholars believe that the Philistines originated from Greek migrant groups of the Aegean civilization that, from roughly 1200 BC onwards, settled in the area and gradually intermixed with the indigenous Canaanite population. In this context, they are also generally identified with the Peleset, who are mentioned in ancient Egyptian records and are hypothesized to have been among the invading Sea Peoples around the Late Bronze Age collapse. At their territorial zenith, the Philistine confederation may have stretched along the Canaanite coast from Arish in the Sinai Peninsula to the Yarkon River running through Tel Aviv, and as far inland as Ekron and Gath.

In 604 BC, Babylonian armies under Nebuchadnezzar II invaded Philistia, annexing it to the Neo-Babylonian Empire and destroying Ashkelon and Ekron in response to Philistine revolts. Following this campaign, Philistia and its population disappear from recorded history. In the 2nd century BC, the Philistine confederation and its cities (Joppa, Jamina, and Azotus) reappear in biblical and Greek texts in the context of the Maccabean Revolt and the Hellenistic period.

History

Ancient Egyptian hieroglyphic records from the New Kingdom period record a group of the Sea Peoples called the pwrꜣsꜣtj, generally transliterated as either Peleset or Pulasti, as invading Egypt in the mid-13th century BC. About a century later, pharaoh Ramesses III boasted of having defeated the Peleset, and allegedly relocated them to the southern abandoned coast of Canaan, recording this victory on a Medinet Habu temple inscription dated to c. 1150 BC. The pwrꜣsꜣtj are generally identified as the Philistines.