291. Ancient Gaza: The Philistines (Part 1)

0:00If you want access to bonus episodes, reading lists for every series of Empire, a chat community, Discounts for all the books mentioned in the week's podcast, add free listening and a weekly newsletter. Sign up to Empire Club at www.empirepoduk.com.

0:28Hello and welcome to Empire with me, Anita Arnand. And me, William Durrumpel. And we are starting a brand new series today, one which has been in the news for the last two years. How would you put it, William? I mean, the deepest of emotions swirl around the very concept of even discussing this. This is the most divisive subject in the world at the moment, I think it's fair to say. There is such high emotions when talking about Gaza and Palestine and Israel. never have views on this being more polarized friendships have been lost but what is important i think is that we all need to do our best to understand the long background to this story and that has been notably absent i haven't seen on a single tv documentary i haven't seen on a single radio show anything that taught me about the history the deep history of the story of gaza And that's what we're going to try and lay out in the series.

1:29Absolutely. So as always on Empire, we sort of try to go back to the very, very beginning. And first of all, you know, one thing that we should all know, Gaza is one of the oldest urban centres on planet Earth. One of the most fought over and contested spaces. We just talked about that for over 3000 years. And it is also just look at a map. It's the crossroads between Africa and Asia, the desert and the Mediterranean. So for millennia, because of the geographical location of this place, it's been a crucial strategic and economic hub. Once an incredibly rich port, and you might remember when we talked about the Nabataeans and got really excited about that, from which spices, incense, perfumes, the things that you perhaps know less about, wines of Asia, reached Greece and Rome through Gaza.

2:17And it was also this sort of sentinel fortress guarding the best land route, leading from the Levant, the eastern Mediterranean coastline, all the way to Egypt. And I think one of the consistent things you see in history is that everyone wants to own this and conquer it. And over the centuries, we hear the succession of aggressive foreign empires, the Egyptians, the Syrians, the Greeks, the Romans, the Turks, and finally the British, of course, coming through and fighting here. What's more difficult to see, I think, in the chronicles, because we always get the story of the victors, and it's always the victors writing their version.

2:51But what we don't see so much in the chronicles are the locals who are living here throughout these centuries and whose DNA has remained remarkably consistent. The modern inhabitants of this land today share much the same wide mix of DNA as the groups who live here today. And successive studies have shown this. So when you dig up skeletons from the Bronze Age, they show still a broad similarity to the sort of thing that you're getting with the modern inhabitants of the land. So it isn't like there's been a massive, despite all these conquests, that there's been massive extinctions, if you like.

3:26In a very broad sense, the DNA is consistent over the millennia. And of course, today, as we just said, this area is still at war. The people of Gaza are now clinging on, threatened with both starvation and expulsion. and this is a part of the world that dominates our front pages yet we do not know this early history and we should know it's absolutely crucial to understand current events to know what preceded it in detail going really into the minutiae so that people can understand it and I don't think there has been in any media anywhere in the world a series like this I've been looking around and searching for it and it just hasn't been this so I think this is the first time that people have attempted to put into broadcast form a deep dive into the history of Gaza.

4:08So look, that's what we're doing. That's what this new series is about. We're going to talk about the history, the inhabitants, the peoples who have passed through, and the importance of this narrow stretch of land. And as William was saying, this is obviously a deeply contested, divisive subject. And so we are treading into this with care, put it that way. We're going to try and be very careful about this. We will lay out the different views about the past. And we do this because we have the handholding of some of the top academics in the world on this region. And to start, let me welcome the new Professor of Ancient History at Cambridge, Joe Quinn, author of the magnificent How the World Made the West, a 4 ,000-year history.

4:51Welcome to you, Joe. Thank you. It's an honour to be here. We should say that Joe's wonderful book, How the World Made the West, has just been long listed for the Kundal Prize for History, which is the world's grandest history prize. So we're all the luckier to have her here. Is that the one you really, really, really want? Or is that one that That's the one I've once been a finalist for. Didn't even get on the long list this time. Oh, darling. Oh, darling. I didn't want to tap dance over your grief. But yeah, let's do that. Tippity tap. Well done, Joe. I can't think of a nicer person to be displaced by.

5:22I feel like I'm being made the Assyrian king here. Yes, you are. And wear your crown with pride, lady. So let's first of all just situate Gaza. I mean, most people who watch the news will know where it is. But let's situate it in old biblical times, if you like. I mean, where do we place it? The city of Gaza, the wider Gaza Strip, as we now call it, is in the southern stretch of the Levantine coast. The Levant, of course, is the name that European travellers gave the region of Western Asia between the Mediterranean and Iraq. So it's literally the land of the rising sun, modern Syria, Lebanon, Israel, Palestine and Jordan.

6:00and the coastal plain is a kind of fairly narrow strip of flatland it's below the spine of highlands that run all the way down the levant from north to south so from mount lebanon the golen heights the west bank jerusalem they're all part of that very mountainous terrain above the coast and the plain is a very different world so it's very good farming land it's got a pretty gentle climate but it's also of course more open to attack both from sea and land and it is as you said Anita it's this bottleneck of communications between Africa and Asia. And Gaza itself is the southernmost port on that coast.

6:37And it does it. It marks the end point, the Mediterranean end of that caravan route that's been bringing spices and incense up from southern Arabia for millennia. The truth is that the population of the cities of the southern Levant, especially the port cities, is always going to be a mix. It would be strange if there weren't both local and non-local elements. And that's what the culture looks like too. It's interesting when Victorian and Edwardian travellers start using that word, Levant, and talk about people as being Levantine, they mean actually mixed, don't they? It's one of the defining features of this region that in the late Ottoman period, when British travellers are first using this word, that you have every community, every religion.

7:19And this is not just true of the 19th century when this word is coined, it's equally true of the early centuries that you write about, Joe. I think what we should say also is it's very fertile. I think a lot of us think about sand in Gaza. We hear about these tunnels which Hamas are digging through the sand. And I think many of us, particularly seeing the recent photographs of the destruction in Gaza, assume that it's a desert. In fact, the whole point of Gaza is it's very fertile. The Wadi Gaza has underground waters which bubble up and which for millennia have attracted, you know, migratory seabirds.

7:52It's where they stop, too, on their way in every direction. And as we mentioned in the beginning, this is somewhere that has grown the, not just wine, but the best wine of the ancient world. Sweet wine, like the modern Chateau Hichem, you know, the kind of smartest sweet wine you could possibly buy. That was what Gaza wine was. And last week, actually, I went to an exhibition, which I think, Joe, you're going to go to next week called The Treasures of Gaza in the Institut du Mont d 'Arab in Paris. And the first thing you see when you walk into the first hall of that exhibition are these enormous, long amphorae, which archaeologists call torpedo jars, because they do look very like torpedoes, except they're ceramic.

8:36And these once held this incredibly sought-after wine that from the most ancient times, right up until about the 6th century to Anglo-Saxon times, was being exported around the entire Mediterranean and beyond to Britain because it was so very, very delicious and the grapes there were so very, very special. Jo, can we go right back to sort of where archaeological record begins, if you like, sort of 2000 to 1500 BCE? I mean, what do we know about the people and the place from then? Okay, so we're in the height of the Bronze Age at this point so there's these huge inland agricultural empires that are trying to carve up the known world between them and i should say the known world doesn't include europe yet because no one knows much about it and they're even less interested but from the ghazan point of view say around 1500 bce you've got the hittites ruling most of anatolia modern turkey to the north you've got the mesopotamians the babylonian kings in what's now iraq to the east and closest of all so just the other side of the desert, you've got Egypt, which is at this point for 1 ,500 years been an enormously powerful kingdom and empire.

9:48And then the Levant itself is, by contrast, this region of small cities and kingdoms, a lot of cities strung along the coast, a lot of small ports, also along the rivers, along the roads up to the mountain passes, over to Turkey and Iraq and so on. And all these tiny little polities, might say little, little powers, they're trying to negotiate their position with and between these bigger empires that surround them. And conversely, all the kind of great kings, the big emperors, are very keen to control the Levant precisely because it lies in between them. It's a zone of communication between them, very important routes running through it, both by donkey and by sail along the coast.

10:35for these kings controlling trade, travel and communications is probably the most important thing. One name that comes up very early on in any discussion of the early history of Gaza are the Canaanites. They appear in the Bible. Tell us about that word because it's a sort of complicated term, isn't it? No one called themselves the Canaanites. No, exactly. So it's basically a generic external name for people who live on the Levantine coast and some of the kind of closer inland areas. So when you first come across it, second millennium BCE, it's used to mean something like brigand or barbarian or something.

11:13Who's using it, Joe? You say? Well, the local kings, basically, because that's who we have the evidence from. You know, the documents, often they're written on their own statues of these small local kings who are talking about each other, essentially. So they use this term Canaan and talk about Canaanites to mean kind of of people who live in other parts of the Levant. Nothing very specific, maybe sort of the way that we might use a word like the Midlands or something. And then the Hebrew Bible uses it as, again, a generic term for people who are living in the whole region of the Levant, at least as far as the River Jordan.

11:47So this is the promised land. So it's not exclusive to the Bible. You have other people using this term too. No, no, no. There's lots of other sources for it, but they're all external. As you said, nobody actually calls themselves a Canaanite. And I think this is very common in antiquity. Outsiders naturally group similar looking and sounding people together just for ease of comprehension, put them in a tidy box with a label on top. That's what we do with people in the past. But it doesn't actually tell us anything about the people themselves. When the Bible talks about, does it only use the word sort of Canaan or Canaanites or does the word Gaza come in at all?

12:22Or is that a much, much later terminology that comes in? I think it would be a different kind of terminology, not necessarily later, because we do have references to Gaza, Ahazutu and so on in the Bronze Age. But I think it's more that the Bible tends to be talking about specific events in specific places. And it's more interested in, for instance, Gath, which is another ancient Philistine centre. Oh, we're coming to that. We're coming to that because there's a great blockbuster giant of a story coming from there. But I wouldn't want to give the impression that it's kind of erasing Gaza. It's just nothing very important.

13:00And the Bible happens there. Now, the earliest site, Joe, that archaeologists have identified is one that was dug by an Edwardian archaeologist, the great Flinders Petrie. I remember my grandfather, when I was about 10 years old, giving me an old Victorian or Edwardian book of Flinders Petrie's 10 years excavating in Egypt. And he digs this site, Tel el-Adjul, and finds all sorts of early stuff, doesn't he? That's right. Basically, this is ancient Gaza. This is Bronze Age Gaza City, effectively. Unsurprisingly, this is an enormously important port. It's selling grain, olive oil, wine for the whole region.

13:36It's also an outlet for copper from the mountains. You've got evidence in the Bronze Age site for imports from local places, Syria, Jordan, the big kingdoms, Mesopotamia, Anatolia and so on. but also Crete, Mycenaean, Greece, huge amount of material from Cyprus just across the water. And you also get a lot of sophisticated jewellery and luxury items in the living areas as well. So it's not just a sort of through port. There are people who are actually profiting from all of this actually in the city itself. And am I right in saying, I mean, correct me if I'm wrong, that the first sort of archaeologically verifiable name and even a face is that of Egyptian pharaoh Thutmose III in Gaza.

14:21Is that right? Now tell us about Thutmose III because sometimes I've heard him referred to as the Napoleon of Egypt. Now, what is that all about? Right, yeah, he's sometimes called Thutmose the Great or something like that. So he was this kind of brilliant pharaoh. He was a great soldier, a great general, a great strategist, but he had good training because for the first 22 years of his rule, so he rules for 45 years altogether, And give us the years, give us the era that we're talking about. I know I went Thutmose, which is a very Essex pronunciation in retrospect. I mean, I've heard sort of Thutmose's, Thutmose's.

14:55I mean, what years are we talking about? How should I say his name? I think people worry far too much about pronunciation in the past. We don't have tape recorders, unfortunately. And you can read ancient inscriptions in a lot of different ways. So I call them Thutmose's. Egyptian ones only have consonants, isn't that right? Yeah, a lot of them do. Some of them only have syllables. End syllables are always tricky. So I think we can call him Tutmosa, Tutmosis, whatever we like. I think Tutmosa is good. Let's stick with that for this podcast. But we're talking, which years are we talking about, the rule of Tutmosa III?

15:29So Tutmosis ruling in the 15th century BCE. He first becomes pharaoh in 1479. But the crucial thing is that he has incredible training because for the first 22 years of his reign, he's actually ruling jointly with his stepmother and aunt who's called Hatshepsut and she's one of the very only really two female pharaohs oh my god I love Hatshepsut with my whole DNA and bone marrow she's incredible so she was famously the one who you know you saw her sometimes depicted with a beard almost like one of those clip-on beards but she also she launches trade expeditions all the way down the Red Sea she builds incredible things all over Egypt she's really an extraordinary character.

16:12So he's got 22 years with her. She dies and then he rules alone after that. And he himself has this incredible career. So he expands both south and north. So south into Nubia and north into the Levant. We're in the 1450s BCE now. And he's using Gaza as a kind of forward base, is he? Yeah, he conquers Gaza and then it's a forward base would be one way to put it. And as you say, it's actually the first mention of the city of Gaza in Egyptian records, which records its conquest, unfortunately. And that's really when Gaza falls under, in some kind of formal sense, Egyptian control. It's not very strong at first.

16:52They have to pay an annual tribute. There's some form of military presence there. And trade is flourishing at this time. It's not just war, war, war. Yeah, trade continues to flourish. In general, it's very useful for the great kings that their possessions in the Levant keep up good trading contacts because that's what they're profiting from. They're skimming off essentially the profits of trade. And I read somewhere that the pharaohs put a monopoly on this fancy Ghazan wine. God, you're obsessed with the wine. Well, it was a big deal. If you go to the exhibition, this was the main export. I guess I'll learn about that when I go to the exhibition next week.

17:29Okay. So we have this sort of sensation of a window opening, don't we, Jo, when we get the Tel Elamana letters. Suddenly, it's one of those moments in ancient history when we have detailed correspondence that somehow survives. And it survives in this case because it's written on Egyptian clay tablets, which have survived. And they look, according to our lovely producer Anushka, like big rivetas. Mammoth shredded wheat. What do they tell us, Jo? Tell us about Tel Elamana letters. What do they say about Gaza? Yeah, it's OK. This is amazing. This is an incredible archive of letters found completely by chance by a local woman digging beside the Nile in the late 19th century.

18:09And it turns out that they are the kind of correspondence archive of the pharaoh Akhenaten and some of his father, some of his son as well. So Tel Alamana was the capital of Akhenaten. Akhenaten, we should say, was sometimes said to be the first monotheist, isn't he? He is sometimes said to be that. Yeah, he was certainly a very curious individual. But he's ruling in the late 14th century. It's also, as well as his interesting cultural pursuits, he's a very serious empire as well. He has a hot wife, Nefertiti. And he has a hot wife, Nefertiti. Exactly. He's a very, very interesting guy, Akhenaten.

18:45This archive, it's a real mixture. It's got a lot of letters from the other great kings of the era, the king of the Hittites, the king of the Babylonians and so on, which are kind of wonderful themselves, people complaining about not getting RSVPs for parties and things. Amazing. But then there are the other set, about half the correspondence, is actually from Egypt's various vassal kings in the Levant. And they're asking the king for help, asking Pharaoh for help, or reporting their own news or quite often reporting on each other, kind of jockeying for position with the pharaoh. And we don't actually seem to have any letters from Gaza itself, though some of them, it's not clear quite where they're from.

19:26But Gaza is mentioned in some of these letters as Azatut. And what it seems to be a kind of subordinate settlement then to another local king, probably Ashkelon, which is another major port to the north. We're not sure. But there are a lot of letters or several letters from the king of Gath inland. And that's going to become a very big Philistine city in the next kind of the Iron Age. But they're very interesting because one of them mentions a rebellion of 30 towns under the control of this king of Gath. So you get the sense that cities like Gath, these relatively kind of small little city kingdoms, could be actually very substantial and have their own mini empires, even in this very early date.

20:07And in fact, archaeologists actually found Egyptian inscriptions at Gath from this period. So you kind of get it from both sides. And is Gaza a colony or is it semi-independent? What's its position at the time of Tel Alamana? Does it govern itself or do the Egyptians just tell it what to do all the time? Well, I think what you can see over time is a sort of tightening of control. So in the early stages, the Egyptians basically want annual tribute. They want loyalty from the local kings and leaders in the southern Levant. But by the end of the Bronze Age, so kind of the next period after the Amarna letters, you can really talk, I think, in terms of an occupation.

20:44There's a network of forts to protect the caravan routes and the copper mines and so on. So by the end of the period, it's quite a fortified region. And then you get this thing which is very much at the heart of your most recent book, How the World Made the West, which is this fascinating period. And it's a bit like a sort of archaeological version of one of those sci-fi films where there's some terrible catastrophe and there's only a bunch of people left on Lindespan or what's that film, 30 Days After or whatever. It's the archaeological equivalent of that, the Bronze Age collapse. This is a period that you write so beautifully about where we see all these empires have been building up, all with scribes, all with administrations, nice little empires of their own.

21:25The whole lot are knocked in a sort of scattering of skittles in a few years. Tell us about this. Yes, this is a period of about a century or so, around 1200 BCE, which sees the collapse or at least severe weakening of all the great powers of the Bronze Age. So including the Hittites, the Babylonians, the Mycenaean kingdoms in Greece. And no one knows why. This is just one of the great mysteries of antiquity. The theories from climate crisis to political rebellion, they all have some evidence in their favour. It's probably a mixture of all sorts of things. Best take on it to my mind is Eric Klein's in his wonderful book 1177, where he says what the real problem was, was the extent to which these enormous empires had come to depend on each other.

22:10We really see that in the Amarna letters. So a food shortage here or a pirate attack there could really quickly become a problem for everyone. This is also the background to, some people think, to the Homeric Trojan Wars, don't they? And sort of the idea of Odysseus going out in his boat and going around the Mediterranean. This is all this sort of world that is in collapse with warriors, seaborne warriors, with lots of swords and shields turning up on the coast and making a mischief of themselves. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, what we get in the Homeric epics is a sort of look back at what people then are imagining this period was like three or four hundred years earlier.

22:48But they actually include lots of stories that have just kind of been passed down through the period. So you do get a bit of a sense of what the era was like. And I think particularly in the Homeric ethics, you get a sense of the anxieties and fears, people who are away from home, don't know if they're ever going to get back again, don't know what's happening in their absence. And that, I think, does capture something about the world in this period. You use the word philistine. And that, to me, just the word itself is fascinating because, you know, these days it is a pejorative for somebody who doesn't have culture, who doesn't think about things.

23:19But it is part of this story and it is the name given to a people. Now, I'm fascinated to know who were these people, because some describe them as if they're sort of warrior Vikings. Others describe them as if they're plundering pirates. Who were the Philistines? Well, OK, so for this, we have to think ourselves into that era of the collapse of the Bronze Age. So Egypt hangs on longer than most of the other great kingdoms. But the Egyptian records we have And that period suggests this is a very difficult period for them as well. Their attacks on Egypt itself, rebellions in their occupied territories.

23:51And it's in all this turmoil that we first hear of these people that the Egyptians called Pelesets, somewhere in the Levant. And they're mentioned in this inscription on the great temple of Ramesses III at Luxor. And it describes this coalition of foreign factions who get together to attack Egypt in year eight of his own reign. And that's the year that's now probably 1177. That's the current thinking on that, 1177 BCU. And so the Pellicet are one of these communities who formed this coalition. There are several others, Luka, Sheridan, Cheka and so on. But one of these communities is called Pellicet.

24:28And the inscription defines the coalition as a whole as northerners and as foreigners. And it says they're conspiring on their islands. And it also says they'd be making attacks all over the eastern Mediterranean. It's not just Egypt. And some of the individual groups, though not actually the Peleset, are also described as coming from the sea. And that's where the modern concept of the Sea Peoples comes from. It's a kind of modern extension to all these people of the label that the Egyptian inscriptions gave some of them. And now who these various communities really were, where they were from, it's very unclear.

25:06They may have been pirates of some kind. Maybe it was more of a regional political coalition. but they also turn up separately in various other documents from this era, not all of them Egyptian. So they're definitely a phenomenon that are taking up attention in this era. Now, in this inscription that we mentioned, Ramesses III Mortuary Temple at Medinet Habu in Thebes, the capital of Upper Egypt, you actually have pictures of these invaders of Egypt, is the perspective being given in these pictures. And they wear two sorts of different sort of hats, don't they? You can see them because some of them got feathered hairdressers and the others have got horned helmets, like sort of Vikings and Victorian picture books.

25:46And these guys, according to the inscription of Ramesses III at Medina, the Habu are defeated by the Egyptians and sent packing. And there's a kind of very self-congratulatory inscription saying their seed is not, their heart and soul are finished forever and ever. And those who came forward together on the seas, the full flame in front of them at the Nile Mass, while a stockade of lances surrounded them on the shore, prostrated on the beach, slain, and were made into heaps of corpses from head to tail. So that's the first time we find these Peleset, or Philistines, or the word which then evolves into Palestinians, being mentioned, and they're already being massacred.