Philistines as Sea Peoples, Etc.

[David L. White]

[ Moderator's note:
  David White is responding to a posting by Stanley Friesen dated 31 Jan 2001.
  --rma ]

> It is more likely that the Philistines are represented in Egyptian records
> by the name 'Plst' (usually written out as Peleset).

        Perhaps the Philistines are considered "Sea Peoples" mainly by
modern historians.  But I believe that the same groups that other people
often called "Sea Peoples" (the term is not, I think, a modern invention)
were called "Turshas" by the Egyptians, though it would be par for the
course if different groups wound up being considered the same, different
peoples had different ideas about which groups were and were not "Sea
Peoples", etc.
        And while I am on the subject I might as well note that even if
"Tursha"-"Troy"-"Etruria" and so on are the same word, the people in
question might no more be the same than are the various people called
"Welsh"-"Vlach"-Waloon", and so on.  (This ethnonym, by the way, though it
is often said to mean "foreigner", to my knowledge is applied only to
foreigners who were also, as far as the Germans were concered, Romans, so
perhaps its meaning was, or at some point became, more narrow than is
generally supposed.)  But when we have Herodutus and various misty
pre-Vergils (for lack of a better term) telling us that the people in
question were the same, that puts a different light on things.  Perhaps the
Aeneid, like the Iliad, is not as much sheer invention as some would have
it.  But the sad truth is that the truth of this matter is probably
unrecoverable, within standards of certainty or near-certainty that will
satisfy all observers.  Sometimes information is truly lost, and cannot be
made good.
        I should also note that Mycenean shows /h/ for intervocalic /s/.
But this is not a serious problem for the idea that /troia/ goes back to
/trosia/, for two reasons.  First, we would expect that if the linguistic
ancestors of the Greeks came in from the north, probably more northeast,
then they would have picked up a name for the people of the Troy are (which
seems to have been culturally stable during the relevant period, as far as
we can judge from archeology) long before the got to and took control of
Crete.  So they might have had intervocalic /s/ at the point that /trosia/
was borrowed, only to lose it by Mycenean.  Second, even if this is not
true, and Greek at the time in question had no intervocalic /s/, [hy], more
or less ich-laut, necessarily re-analyzed as /hi/ in accordance with the
sound-structure of Greek, would still have been the neareast approximation
that they could have come up with for /sh/, but this /h/ too would have been
lost, leading again to /troia/.  So it really doesn't matter, though the
case is a tad stronger if loss of /s/ was after borrowing of the ancestor of
/troia/, since [sy] is closer to /sh/ than is /hy/.  But not much, not
critically.
        As for Mesopotamian gods supposedly being expected among the
Etruscans if they had ben from Anatolia, I do not accept this.  The cultural
associations of the eastern coast of Anatolia have always been more Aegean
than (for lack of a better word) interior Anatolian.  Aegean rather than
Mesopotamian gods are not, I think, at all surprising in this context.
        If I am not mistaken, the Etruscans share with the Minoans the
cultural trait of being "clean-shaven" (something considered almost bizarre
among the Greeks and Semites), and it has occurred to me to wonder whether
the proto-Etruscans might have been among the constituent peoples of early
Crete.  But that is getting into what is truly unrecoverable.   And I seem
to recall that the Hittites too were "clean-shaven", which weakens the case
somewhat.   It would be good to know the history of shaving ...

Dr. David L. White