The origins of the Philistines have tradi-tionally been understood within the context of a migration of “Sea Peoples” at the beginning of the Iron Age. However, excavations in other areas of the eastern Mediterranean have not yielded com-pelling evidence of a large-scale migration. We contend that migration is still the best explanation of the evidence, but the effect on the archaeologi-cal record of the disparate responses of the host-communities into which the immigrants settled has been overlooked. Whereas those immigrants who settled in places such as Cilicia, the Amuq Plain, and Phoenicia encountered a decentralized politi-cal landscape into which they were quickly absorbed, the immigrants who landed in the south-ern Levant faced a still-powerful Egypt which was able to confine them. Within a restricted space, the immigrant Sea Peoples and indigenous Canaanites were galvanized into a unique Philistine ethnos
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