THE IRON AGE KINGDOM OF PALISTIN: 'NORTHERN PHILISTINES' IN SYRIA AND TURKEY?
[Kay] Kohlmeyer, aware of the find's political implications in a country with 400,000 Palestinian refugees, downplays the inscription's significance. "I worry that this could become a pilgrimage site for Palestinians," he says.
Andrew Lawler: Temple of the Storm God(2009).
THE KINGDOM OF PALISTIN EMERGES
Discoveries in this century have led to a radical transformation of the political history of early Iron Age Syria and southwest Turkey, by revealing an important kingdom possibly connected to the Philistines: The Kingdom of Palistin, emerging from a neglect of 27 centuries.
Although the evidence for the kingdom have been slowly growing since the excavations of Tell Tayinat in the 1930s and discoveries such as the Meharde(1959) and Sheizar(1979) stelae, it was not until this century that advances in desciphering the Luwian language inscriptions led to the realization that the obscure Syro-Hittite kindom, whose name was believed to be Padasatini or Wadasatini was instead the kingdom of Palistin (later Walistin) and this, in connection of the rich Mycenaean-style pottery made from local materials at its capital at the beginning of its existince, led to a now widely accepted theory that at least the name of the kingdom came from the Philistines.
Its possible, but far from proven, that the entire polity might have had its origin in founding by Philistines, who would have mixed with locals and adapted Syro-Hittite culture, religion, symbols of rulership and soon also names.
In what follows we will try to give a quick overview of what has been discovered and in the very end we will try to show the connections and importance these finds have with the modern Palestinian struggle for liberation from the Israeli occupation and fullfillment of the right of return.
LATE BRONZE AGE COLLAPSE AND THE BEGINNING OF THE IRON AGE
In the early 12th century the Hittite empire of Hatti, which had ruled current Turkey, Syria and parts of northern Iraq and Lebanon, collapsed. The last dated text that seemingly references the empire as still in existence comes from 1192 BCE. At the same time the great Mycenaean citadels in mainland Greece fell one after another. Greece experienced a collapse of level of culture, not just states; the art of writing was lost for four centuries.
This was the Late Bronze Age Collapse that witnessed political fragmentation, lower levels of urbanisation, population and trade in the eastern Mediterranean and the Near East. To this was connected the apparent immigration of the so-called 'Sea Peoples', connected to collapse and abandonment of states and city-states large and small, and speculated to be drawn from both near (Cilicia, Greece) and far (Sardinia, Sicily).
This heralded the beginning of the Iron Age in the eastern Mediterranean, which for centuries was a lesser age for much of the area; the Assyrian empire experienced brief re-expansion under Tiglath-Pileser I(1115-1075 BCE) followed by confinement to its core areas and Cyprus flourished as its competitors in the trade networks of the area were reduced or lay in ruins.
Egypt, while at first appearing to stand as an island of stability in the turmoil around it, started to decline in the 1140s and after the death of the last Ramesside king Ramses XI around 1070 BCE was, in reality but not in name, divided in two parts with its empire in Syro-Palestine and Nubia lost.
The centuries from 1200 BCE to 900 BCE have thus been called 'a Dark Age' because of the apparent retreat of higher civilization and political, state-level formations, of which Greece is only the extreme example. In the Near East much of this period has been 'silent' because of the limited number of surviving texts.
TELL TAYINAT
In the Amuq plain on the border of modern states of Turkey and Syria a population with Aegean connections seems to have settled the long abandoned site of Tell Tayinat in the later 12th century. Tell Tayinat, 25 kilometers from the Mediterranean coast, is situated on the Turkish side of the border, on the eastern bank of the Orontes river where it makes a turn to the west. Near lies Tell Atchana, the site of the city and minor kingdom of Alalakh, which was abandoned about 1200 BCE. It had came to existence after 2000 BCE, when the first settlement period at Tell Tayinat had come to an end.
Alalakh has been widely assumed to have been destroyed by the Sea Peoples, but dates from Tell Tayinat put its re-settlement at around 1115 BCE so a direct connection between destruction of Alalakh and re-settlement of Tell Tayinat seems to be out of the question. As a reason for the incomers settling at Tell Tayinat, the rich agricultural resources of the area are likely to have been of greatest importance and control (if any) of the diminished trade through the area must have been of a secondary importance.
The incomers produced Aegean-style pottery from local materials, had a combined agricultural and pastoral economy and seemingly mixed with the existing local population and were assimilated by them. It's possible they left behind them little except their genes, perhaps a small rudimentary polity and - most scholars believe - a name for the land that gives a strong hint of their origin.
LAND OF PALISTIN
The name of the land was Palistin. Around 1025 CE Tell Tayinat was Kunulua, a flourishing capital of significant, growing Syro-Hittite state using the Indo-European Luwian language inherited from the Hittites - who had used it in their own public monuments - and with a king who embraced the symbols and traditions of the Great Kings of Hittite Hatti.
It had eclipsed in power Aleppo, where the ruler of Kunulua placed his own image in a relief beside a Hittite-er image of the Storm God. This ruler was also possibly able to make Carchemish - the ancient city of Karkamish, and its dynasty of rulers descending from Hittite viceroys - a vassal; at least that is what he claimed.
He was Taita I, 'the Hero and King of the Palistineans'. Taita might even have been a descendant of the Hittite royal house or their local vassals - the last known king of Nuhasse was called Tette - or perhaps he was a Hurrian as his name possibly hints. The Hurrians were a local people of significant antiquity, speaking a language isolate, who had had the major kingdom of Mitanni until it was taken over by the Assyrians and integrated to their kingdom first as a vassal state around 1330 BCE and fully by 1230 BCE.
Hurrians' cultural reach had extended to southern Canaan, where a mayor of Jerusalem under the 'heretic' pharaoh Akhenaten around 1350 BCE had a Hurrian name and Hurrian gods were seemingly worshipped along with local Canaanite ones. There, in southern Canaan, at the same time as Taita I and his successors were extending their kingdom, flourished a group of coastal city states which the Egyptian pharaoh Amenemope(993-984 BCE) called 'the Land of the Philistines'; they are thought to have been descendants of the Sea Peoples, particularly of the Peleset, settled there by the pharaoh Ramses III(1184-1157 BCE) after he defeated a two-pronged Sea People attack both from the sea and the land.
It is possible, but not likely, that the name of northern kingdom of the Palistineans, the kingdom of Palistin, had its origin from a Luwian source. More likely, it was the remnant of the population that had settled Tell Tayinat in the 12th century. Taita I might have been a fully assimilated descendant of those incomers; a representative of a hybrid culture and polity after their mixing with the existing Hittite, Hurrian, Luwian and local Syrian cultures and political and linguistic traditions.
It might have been that the incomers, lacking appropriate traditions of kingship themselves, would have embraced local existing traditions of kingship from the surviving local polities that had emerged from the ruins of the Hittite Empire. Thus the core of the polity would have been formed by the incoming population, who would have - in the manner of many invaders throughout history - been 'conquered' by the higher culture of the existing local population.
THE PHILISTINES
These incomers would have been closely related to the Peleset; in essence, they would have been Philistines. They could be called northern Philistines to separate them from those in Canaan, the southern Philistines.
Philistines at the early Iron Age might not have meant a homogeneous ethnic group of people, but perhaps already a relatively heterogeneous group united (to some extent) by a shared culture and a language. It has been proposed that the Philistines in Canaan came from what became the kingdom of Palistin, but this is based on the possibility that the re-settlement of Tell Tayinat is older than existing evidence of Philistine cities in Canaan.
Only further work can confirm or deny this theory of Philistine expansion to Canaan from Palistin, but more likely is that two different groups diverging from an original heterogeneous population settled both in Tell Tayinat and in Canaan and independently gave rise to the land of Palistin and the land of the Philistines, Palestine.
Far more fantastical possibility would be that for some brief moment there would have been Philistine control of the coastal region from the Bay of Iskenderun down to Gaza and after it ended, these two separate regions would have been left behind. This is extremely unlikely.
Considering the position of the Philistine cities in the coast of Canaan and the importance of urban centres of Palistin for trade, there would certainly have been trade and political contacts between them.
It's unlikely that any idea of kinship or special connection would have long lasted the emergence of Palistin as a kingdom in the Syro-Hittite tradition, whatever the polity's origin, but there would have been exchange of not only goods but also culture, ideas and to a limited extent, people, as with other nearby areas.
THE BIBLICAL (DIS)CONNECTION
When a major discovery of this nature in the Near East is made in this timeframe, there inevitably follow attempts to connect them to places and figures mentioned in the Old Testament.
The possible Philistine connection has naturally been fodder to many theories; in one of them, the weak memory of king Taita acts as a seed for the story of king David in the Bible, although the geographical areas were different.
The kings of Palistin built the major temple of Ain Dara, whose ruins were recently greatly damaged in a Turkish air-strike. The temple of Ain Dara, according to 'biblical archaeologists', resembles the descriptions of the Temple in Jerusalem in the Old Testament and this and other evidence from the kingdom of Palistin has been used to argue for the existence of both for Taita as David and for separately for the existence of the biblical kings David and Solomon.
In the latter theory, Ain Dara is positioned as a model, inspiration for the first Jewish Temple while a somewhat far-fetched speculation has tried to make Taita II, a likely grandson of Taita I or at least a ruler removed a generation from him, into an ally of David by identifying him with the biblical king Toi of Hamath.
There seems no real evidence to call this more than speculation; Ain Dara or another temple like it in the Hittite tradition, might have simply been used as a reference of what a great temple should look like by the authors of the biblical text and the latter claim is based on little more than the fact that if a 'biblical kingdom of David and Solomon' would have existed in the extent imagined, its borders would have been close to those of Palistin / Walistin its own greatest extent, which included Hama(th).
Written evidence for Taita II comes from somewhat north of Hama, in Meharde and Sheizar on the Middle Orontes. This king Taita is named with his mother or wife Kupapiya; mention of her probably signifies important role for her. Perhaps she came from an important dynasty (or a family in that particular area) and/or acted as a regent for an underage king.
THE MIXING OF KINGS: FROM UNKNOWN ORIGINS TO TRANSITION TO HITTITE TRADITION
The apparent re-use of same names in different generations have created controversy of who did what; for example the archaeological evidence for Taita I and Taita II that we follow here is not the only possible and their activities could have been the other way around.
Also the kings named 'Lubarna' in Assyrian sources might be called by the old Hittite title 'labarna' instead of their actual names; thus for example kings Lubarna I and Suppilaliuma II could be one and the same.
In the citadel of Aleppo a panel of a king Taita, who had rebuilt the Temple of the Storm God, was found beside the god's image in 2003. If there are two kings of Taita, this panel would likely belong to the first, ruling around 1025 BCE. If there was just one king of Taita, it might be from mid- to late 10th century BCE. The date has importance considering the extent at different times of Palistin's political control, although in case of Aleppo it might have been indirect, perhaps hegemony instead of Aleppo being ruled directly as part of the kingdom.
The Taita who left inscriptions at Meharde and Sheizar is now considered by many to be a different individual, Taita II. He would have likely been a grandson of Taita I or at least a ruler removed by a generation from Taita I. His reign is estimated to around 950 BCE or little later and under him the kingdom probably achieved its greater extent.
By his time a linguistic shift has changed the first letter in the kingdom's name from 'P' to 'W'. This Taita II was thus a king of Walistin - which is one of the reasons why is considered a separate individual from Taita I.
Whether this change happened in his generation or in the previous one is open; Suppiluliuma I, son of king Manana, is dated near to Taita II and calls himself 'king of Walistin' in his two stelae that have been discovered, but he might have ruled before or after Taita II.
The importance of Suppiluliuma I lies in his traditional royal Hittite name. When the name 'Taita' is of origin of which there is almost as many theories as there are scholars, there is no obscurity in this name and its use is a clear claim to the memory and power of the fallen Hittite Empire.
The enemies Suppiluliuma I claims victory over, the Hiyawa, where also perhaps those of the Hittite Empire of old - the Ahhiyawa. If so, this would place the must contested Ahhiyawa in Cilicia, where the discoveries of the two Arsuz stelae of Suppiluliuma I were made.
Suppiluliuma I would have ruled from mid- to late 10th century BCE. If the origin of Palistin was Philistine, in the Suppiliuliuma I, king of Walistin, we have see the transition to Hittite kingship fully complete.
THE LATER HISTORY OF THE KINGDOM
During the following kings of Walistin, carrying traditional royal Hittite names, the kingdom lost its eastern and southern territories. From the 870s BCE onwards, the recovering Empire of Assyria started to recover its interactions (often hostile) with the kings of Walistin like Lubarna I(c. 870 BCE) and Halparuntiya / Qalparunda II(fl. 857-848 BCE), who were forced to pay tribute to Assyria.
Although there is no good evidence that the kingdom and its inhabitants ever themselves called it anything but Palistin / Walistin, by the time of Neo-Assyrian Empire's rise its kings are called kingdoms of Patina / Patinu / Pattin or Unqi in Assyrian sources.
Among these kings is the king Suppiluliuma II(c. 858 BCE), parts of whose grand but rather crudely made colossal statue, was discovered in Tell Tayinat in 2012. Overall in the sculptural arts in the kingdom the statues of animals, including royal symbols as lions, are to our eyes of greater quality. This particular statue was apparently buried after the Assyrians conquered the city and ended the kingdom's existence in 738 CE.
It has been proposed that the name of the last king, 'Tutammu' in Assyrian sources, should instead be read Taita, which would show great continuity in naming (and thus, we can assume, in royal tradition) from the first known king to the last.
Assyria had been able to interfere in the internal affairs of the kingdom of Walistin / Patina since around 831 BCE at least, when it had intervened to remove an usurper. Under Tiglath-Pileser III(746-727 BCE) who re-invigorated the empire and re-started its expansion, the weakened kingdom of Walistin / Patina ceased to exist and became the Assyrian province of Kinalia.
Soon the kingdom's existence was forgotten, and only in southern Canaan did the name and memory of the Philistines give a lasting name to the land, which it carries to this day: Palestine.
WHERE MODERN PALESTINE AND 'THE OTHER PALESTINE' COME TOGETHER
At the end, we return where we began, the quote from the German archaeologist Kay Kohlmeyr. According to him, it's dangerous to make historical connections that could be useful for modern Palestinians in their difficult circumstances.
Let's quote it here again:
Kohlmeyer, aware of the find's political implications in a country with 400,000 Palestinian refugees, downplays the inscription's significance. "I worry that this could become a pilgrimage site for Palestinians."
There has been many attempts to make these discoveries to support the Biblical narrative which is also the Zionist narrative of Israel. These attempts fail when looked at critically; the archaeological and written evidence of the kings of Palistin shows no political contacts with Palestine: Not with Philistine cities nor with any polity, mentioned in Bible or otherwise, if we dismiss the identification of Taita II with Toi of Hamath.
So far the story of the 'northern Philistines' (if the people of the land of Palistin were such) seems to have taken place separately from those of southern Philistines and Palestine. The evidence of Palistin so far doesn't confirm or show wrong any part of the Biblical and Zionist narrative.
Beyond the scholarly attempt to identify Taita I with David and the implications of 'David being Goliath', there has been no attempt to put the 'other Palestine' in service of the modern Palestinian narrative.
Beyond the fact that it puts a stake through the heart of the silly Zionist hasbara claim that a state of Palestine can't be founded because it hasn't existed before (which would have made the founding of any state in human history impossible, because there would always have had to exist a state with the same name before) it has no direct connection; as far as Palestinian narrative claims Philistines as ancestors, the 'other Palestine' at most shows distant cousins one be a pit proud.
But Kohlmeyer playing down the importance of the find in fear that it might interest Palestinians and become important for them is itself interesting: In effect its an act of censorship of anciest history based on the fear that a currently oppressed population might find it inspirational and claim symbolic intellectual ownership of it.
It's in this that modern Palestine and the 'other Palestine' come together most importantly; the current oppression and marginalization of Palestinians must be extended through 30 centuries into a distant past, to a state because it likely had a name derived from the same people as modern Palestine.
The Zionist project doesn't only try to colonize (and erase) Palestine both as a geographical and historical entity, removing it from existence both now and in the past; no, for the modern Palestine to be erased, the 'other Palestine' that existed 3000 years ago must be marginalized and, if possible, explained away.
The Zionist project's demand for the control of history, both as record of events in human experience and as a scholarly, pursuit is complete. This reach has clearly reached Kohlmeyer and made him its pawn.
Yet, we can note how strong the fear of the exiled, marginalized Palestinian refugee - living in poverty in a refugee camp in a foreign country - is in those affected by Zionism like Kohlmeyer, and how much of undiscovered power they believe to reside in the Palestinian refugee.
Thus, like the slaves that were forbidden to learn to read so that they couldn't use education as a weapon to free themselves, the Palestinian refugee must be kept ignorant of those intellectual and historical tools that she could use to free herself.
In this, the Zionists and those who accepted their view of the oppressed Palestinians, themselves make the long-lost land of Palistin important. Their fear of it offers a tool for the Palestinians in exile and under occupation.
Without overplaying the kingdom of Palistin's connections with Palestine and the Palestinians, it can be used to oppose the Biblical narrative used to support the occupation, ethnic cleansing and annexation by Zionists and their fellow travelers, and to construct a counter-narrative which can be 'weaponized' to support the liberation of the occupied territories and the return of the ethnically cleansed refugees.
SOURCES:
Cech, Pavel: What If David Was Goliath? Taita, king of the Palistineans in Oeming, Manfred & Slama, Petr: A King like All the Nations? Kingdoms of Israel and Judah in the Bible and History(2015)
Dincol, Belkis et. al.: Two new inscribed Storm-god stelae from Arsuz(İskenderun): ARSUZ 1 and 2(2015)
https://www.academia.edu/13916700/_2015b_Two_new_inscribed_Storm-god_stelae_from_Arsuz_%C4%B0skenderun_ARSUZ_1_and_2_by_Belk%C4%B1s_Din%C3%A7ol_-_Ali_Din%C3%A7ol_-_J.D._Hawkins_-_Hasan_Peker_and_Aliye_%C3%96ztan_with_a_contribution_by_%C3%96mer_%C3%87elik
Emanuel, Jeffrey P.: King Taita and his "Palistin": Philistine State or Neo-Hittite Kingdom(2015), in Antiguo Oriente, vol. 13(2015).
Fridman, Julia: Riddle of the Ages Solved: Where Did the Philistines Come From?
https://www.haaretz.com/archaeology/philistine-homeland-found-and-surprise-1.5401085
Harrison, Timothy P. : Neo-Hittites In the 'Land Of Palistin': Renewed Investigations Tell Ta'yinat on the Plain of Antioch
http://sites.utoronto.ca/tap/assets/harrison_nea_2009_72_4.pdf
Lawler, Andrew: Temple of the Storm God
in Archaeology, volume 62, number 6(2009)
Sass, Benjamin: TAITA, KING OF PALISTIN: CA. 950–900 BCE?
http://www.bu.edu/asor/pubs/nea/documents/sass-reply.pdf
Tell Tayinat & The Amuq Valley
https://www.crane.utoronto.ca/assets/tayinat-eng.pdf
Weeden, Mark : AFTER THE HITTITES: THE KINGDOMS OF KARKAMISH AND PALISTIN IN NORTHERN SYRIA(2013)
https://eprints.soas.ac.uk/17711/1/01-weeden-04_corr-05.pdf
Wiener, Noah: Colossal Neo-Hittite Statue Discovered at Tell Tayinat
https://www.biblicalarchaeology.org/daily/ancient-cultures/ancient-near-eastern-world/colossal-neo-hittite-statue-discovered-at-tell-tayinat/
Younger, K. Lawson Jr : A Political History of the Arameans: From Their Origins to the End of Their Polities(2016)
