Sophistication of Philistines is unearthed by Israeli researchers

AT THE remains of an ancient metropolis in southern Israel, archaeologists are piecing together the history of a people remembered chiefly as the bad guys of the Hebrew Bible.

The city of Gath is helping scholars paint a more nuanced portrait of the Philistines, who appear in the biblical story as the enemies of the Israelites.

Close to three millennia ago, Gath was on the frontier between the Philistines, who occupied the Mediterranean coastal plain, and the Israelites, who controlled the inland hills. The city's most famous resident was Goliath - the giant warrior felled by the young shepherd David with his sling.

The Philistines "are the ultimate other, almost, in the biblical story," said Aren Maeir of Bar-Ilan University, the archaeologist in charge of the excavation.

About 100 diggers from countries including Canada, South Korea and the United States are adding to the wealth of relics found at the site since Prof Maier's project began in 1996.

Several Philistine jugs nearly 3,000 years old have been uncovered from the soil. One painted shard just unearthed had a rust-red frame and a black spiral - a decoration common in ancient Greek art and a hint to the Philistines' origins in the Aegean.

The Philistines arrived by sea from the area of modern-day Greece around 1200BC. They went on to rule major ports at Ashkelon and Ashdod, now cities in Israel, and at Gaza, now part of the Palestinian territory known as the Gaza Strip.

At Gath, they settled on a site that had been inhabited since prehistoric times. Digs have shown that though they adopted aspects of local culture, they did not forget their roots: even five centuries after their arrival they were still worshipping gods with Greek names.

Archaeologists have found that the Philistine diet leaned heavily on grass pea lentils, an Aegean staple. Ancient bones discarded at the site suggest they also ate pigs and dogs, unlike the neighbouring Israelites, who deemed those animals unclean.

Diggers at Gath have also uncovered traces of a destruction of the city in the 9th century BC, including a ditch and embankment built around the city by a besieging army - it is still visible as a dark line running across the surrounding hills. This could have been the work of the Aramean king Hazael in 830BC, as mentioned in the Book of Kings.

Items uncovered at Gath shed light on how the Philistines lived in the 10th and 9th centuries BC, said Seymour Gitin, director of the WF Albright Institute of Archaeological Research in Jerusalem and an expert on the Philistines.

"Gath fills a very important gap in our understanding of Philistine history," Prof Gitin said.In 604 BC, Nebuchadnezzar of Babylon invaded and put the Philistines' cities to the sword. There is no remnant of them after that. Crusaders from Europe in 1099 built a fortress on the remains of Gath, and later the site became home to an Arab village, Tel el-Safi, which emptied during the war surrounding Israel's creation in 1948. Today Gath is in a national park.

Diggers at Gath have found shards preserving names similar to Goliath - which is an Indo-European name, not a Semitic one of the kind that would have been used by the local Canaanites or Israelites.

Prof Maeir said: "It doesn't mean that we're one day going to find a skull with a hole in its head from the stone that David slung at him, but …(the name] reflects a cultural milieu that was actually there at the time."