Damien Mackey
March 2005

We left unfinished in "The Mitannians" article D. Courville's discussion of the archaeology of ancient Alalakh [100]. It might be recalled that Courville had identified Level VII with Yarim-Lim's conquest of this city, a conquest that had suppressed a culture that had then re-emerged, as Courville had estimated it, about 50 years afterwards. "… [the Yarim-Lim] types of pottery were plentiful in Level VI, all but disappeared in Level VII, and then reappeared in all levels from VIII to XVI". Courville wondered what might have been that culture that was interrupted by the Yarim-Lim dynasty, but had then returned subsequent to it. To assist himself in answering his question, he turned to Leonard Woolley's account of his excavations at Alalakh:

… We do indeed know extremely little about the Level VI buildings.
It is to the pottery that we must look for information about Level VI, and the pottery can tell us a good deal. On the one hand we have what I have called the "nationalist revival" of the traditional painted ware which had been suppressed under the late regime, and some examples of this are perfect replicas of the old both in form and in decoration, but as time goes on, there appear modifications of the long-established types - instead of the isolated and static figures of birds or animals these become active and are combined in running scenes surrounding the whole pot without the interruption of the triglyph-like partitions which were once the rule … For the first time we get a polychrome decoration in red and black paint on the buff surface, and the design includes not only birds but the "Union Jack" motive which is specially characteristic of contemporary Palestine … [Emphasis ours].[200]

Courville would identify this distinctive type of pottery as Philistine; the Philistines though thought by modern scholarship not to have settled in Palestine for some 500-600 centuries later. Scripture represents the Philistines as already settled in the days of Abraham, even having a king, Abimelech (Genesis 20:2).

Whilst we get the impression from the Bible that the Philistines were confined largely to southern Palestine (the Shephelah region), we have already discussed how the sacred writers could often tend to look at things from a local perspective. So it would not be surprising to find that the Philistines were also in fact situated much further to the north of Israel, even as far north as Anatolia (like the Mitannians).

Courville now traces the distinctive pottery type described above to early Crete (biblical Caphtor) from whence the Philistines came to Palestine [300]:

… we are now in a position to examine the archaeological reports from Crete for evidences of the early occupation of this site by the Caphtorim (who are either identical to the Philistines of later Scripture or are closely related to them culturally). We now have at least an approximate idea of the nature of the culture for which we are looking, since the culture at Alalakh can be traced, with modifications, back to the point of the Dispersion.
While it has not been possible to correlate the early Archaeological Ages in Crete with those in Palestine with any degree of precision, we can hardly be wrong in recognizing the earliest occupants of Crete as the people who represented the beginnings of the people known in Scripture as the Philistines, by virtue of the stated origins of the Philistines in Crete. …
The only site at which Cretan archaeology has been excavated for its earliest occupants is at the site of the palace at Knosos. At this site deep test pits were dug into the earlier occupation levels. If there is any archaeological evidence available from Crete for this earliest period, it should then be found from the archaeology of these test pits. The pottery found there is described by Dr. Furness, who is cited by Hutchinson.

"Dr Furness divides the Early Neolithic I fabrics into (a) coarse unburnished ware and (b) fine burnished ware, only differing from the former in that the pot walls are thinner, the clay better mixed, and the burnish more carefully executed. The surface colour is usually black, but examples also occur of red, buff or yellow, sometimes brilliant red or orange, and sometimes highly variegated sherds".

A relation was observed between the decoration of some of this pottery from early Neolithic I in Crete with that at the site of Alalakh, though the observations was [sic] interpreted inversely, i.e., that the similarity was due to an influence of the Alalakh culture on that of Crete. Continuing to cite Dr. Furness, Hutchinson commented:

Dr. Furness justly observes that "as the pottery of the late Neolithic phases seems to have developed at Knosos without a break, it is to the earliest that one must look for evidence of origin of foreign connections", and she therefore stresses the importance of a small group with plastic decoration that seems mainly confined to the Early Neolithic I levels, consisting of rows of pellets immediately under the rim (paraleled on burnished pottery of Chalcolithic [predynastic] date from Gullucek in the Alaca [Alalakh] district of Asia Minor). [Emphasis ours.]

Courville concludes:

While the Archaeological Ages of Crete cannot with certainty be correlated with the corresponding eras on the mainland, it would seem that Chalcolithic on the mainland is later than early Neolithic in Crete; hence any influence of one culture on the other is more probably an influence of early Cretan culture on that of the mainland. This is in agreement with Scripture to the effect that the Philistines migrated from Crete to what is now the mainland at some point prior to the time of Abraham.

Courville's estimation that the Yarim-Lim dynasty be chronologically located to "the general era of the Exodus-Conquest"[400] differs from mine, according to which Yarim-Lim is king Hiram, contemporary of David and Solomon (about half a millennium after the Exodus-Conquest). This, in my opinion, has led Courville to a degree of misalignment with the Alalakh stratigraphy. Now, given that Yarim-Lim (Hiram) was an ally of David's, then we might expect that Yarim-Lim had suppressed (at Alalakh VII) one of David's major enemies. These were the Syrians (not relevant here) and the Philistines. This may further support Courville's conclusion that the majority of Alalakh levels pertain to the Philistine conglomerate (various Sea Peoples of which the Philistines were only one - the Bible perhaps lumps these all together under the broad name "Philistines". Heb. Pelushtim).

The Hurrians

These Sea Peoples are, I believe, known in history as the Hurrians; a name that will be considered further on. The dating (put into a revised context) is accurate as are the geographical locations. Moreover, the Hurrians appear to have been dominated by a Mitannian elite (e.g. the Yarim-Lim) dynasty, whose expansion further and further to the east seems to have carried the Hurrians with it.

An identification of the Hurrians with the Sea Peoples (including the Philistines) may have recently received some support from an interesting archaeological find relating to the Habiru. The Habiru, Peter James had convincingly identified as the Philistine insurgents and their allies during the EA era of Abdi-Hiba of Jerusalem (Jehoram of the revision). According to a Net article, "Hurrians": "Recently (and especially after the discovery of the Tikunani Prism) there has been growing support for the theory that the Habiru, who were for a time believed to be the ancient Hebrews, may have been a Hurrian people, too" (www.answers.com/topic/hurrians). The article goes on to tell:

The Hurrians were a people of the Ancient Near East, who apparently entered Mesopotamia from the north before 2500 BC [sic] and established themselves as rulers of small kingdoms in northern Mesopotamia and Syria ….
Their origin, like most aspects of their society, is still a mystery. The Hurrians spoke an agglutinative language, conventionally called Hurrian, which was … clearly related to Urartian - a language spoken about a millennium later in north eastern Anatolia - and possibly very distantly to the present-day Northeast Caucasian languages.

Comments: Velikovsky may well have been right in his identification of the Hurrians with the Carians, at least in name - though the Carians alone were never sufficiently important to be the Hurrians in their entirety. And the reason that the Hurrian language was very like Urartian, much later, is because Urartu (see Velikovsky's map on the progess of the Hurrians eastwards) is right on one of those paths that the Hurrians took on their march eastwards.

The Hurrians gave their name to Syro-Palestine (Egyptian. "Kharru"), just as did the Philistines ("Palestine").

The "Hurrians" article continues:

By about 2400 BC, the Hurrians had expanded southward from the Zagros Mountains or perhaps from the highlands of Anatolia beyond. In the following centuries, Hurrian names occur sporadically in northern Mesopotamia and the area of Kirkuk in modern Iraq. Their presence was attested at Nuzi and Urkesh and other sites. They eventually infiltrated and occupied a broad arc of fertile farmland stretching from the Khabur River valley to the foothills of the Zagros Mountains.

Courville proceeds to link the Philistine pottery he had identified for Crete and Alalakh with that of what he believes to have been a Philistine incursion into northern Israel in king Saul's time (at late MBA - a pretty good fit for Saul) and with the Sea Peoples in southern Palestine (Philistia) at the time of Merenptah and Ramses III:

The new pottery found at Askelon at the opening of Iron I, and correlated with the invasion of the Sea Peoples, was identified as of Aegean origins. A similar, but not identical, pottery has been found in the territory north of Palestine belonging to the much earlier era of late middle Bronze. By popular views this is prior to the Israelite occupation of Palestine. By the altered chronology, this is the period of the late judges and the era of Saul.

The "new pottery" found at Askelon at the beginning of Iron I then belongs to the era c. 700 BC [sic] and not 1200 BC, and so also does the incident of the invasion of the Sea Peoples. ….

That the similar pottery of late Middle Bronze, occurring both in the north and in the south, is related to the culture found only in the south at the later date is apparent from the descriptions of the two cultures. Of this earlier culture, Miss Kenyon commented:

"The pottery does in fact provide very useful evidence about culture. The first interesting point is the wealth of a particular class of painted pottery …. The decoration is bichrome, nearly always red and black, and the most typical vessels have a combination of metopes enclosing a bird or a fish with geometric decoration such as a "Union Jack" pattern or a Catherine wheel. At Megiddo the first bichrome pottery is attributed to Stratum X, but all the published material comes from tombs intrusive into this level. It is in fact characteristic of Stratum IX. Similar pottery is found in great profusion in southern Palestine … very similar vessels are also found on the east coast of Cyprus and on the coastal Syrian sites as far north as Ras Shamra". [600] [Emphasis ours]

Finally compare these descriptions with Courville's [700] quoting Kathleen Kenyon regarding the Sea People's pottery:

There is, however, one class of archaeological material which may reasonably be associated with the newcomers. This is a type of pottery entirely new to Palestine [sic], decorated with elaborate patterns. The most characteristic elements in the decoration are metopes enclosing stylised birds, very often with back-turned head, friezes of spirals, and groups of interlocking semicircles. The form of the vessels and the elements in the decoration all have their origins in the Late Helladic ceramic art of the Aegean. [Emphasis ours].

[100] Donovan Courville, The Exodus Problem and Its Ramifications (CEPR, Vol. II, 1971, Ch. XIII, xi.
[200] Ibid., Chapter XIII, ix, p. 235.
[300] Ibid., XIII, x, p. 236-237.
[400] Ibid., p. 236.
[500] M. Van de Mieroop, A History of the Ancient Near East, cf. p. 255 & p. 276.
[600] CEPR, Ch. XIII, viii, p. 231-232.
[700] Ibid., Ch. XIII, v, p. 227.