The Ethnicity of the Sea Peoples - RePub - Erasmus Universiteit ...

to answer this question it needs to be determined
a b c
Fig. 18. Figurines from (a) Asdod, (b) Cyprus, and (c) Mycenae
(from Sandars 1980: 165, afb. 116).
(a)
(b)
Fig. 19. Comparison of (a) Philistine chamber tombs from Tell
Fara with (b) Mycenaean prototypes (from Waldbaum 1966: 332,
Ill. 1; 336, Ills. 11-14).
97
whether Philistines can be traced on Crete. The answer to
the latter question is no. The only way in which we can account
for a migration of the Biblical Philistines from
Crete is when the latter are identical to the Pelasgians
from Greek literary sources – a view first ventilated by
Etienne Fourmont in 1747 and since then defended by a
substantial number of scholars. 402 The Pelasgians, namely,
are recorded among the population groups on Crete since
the time of Homeros, who, as we have seen in section 2, in
many respects reflects Late Bronze Age history. 403 Now,
the Pelasgians are a population group which inhabited
mainland Greece prior to the first Greeks, and were driven
by them first to Thessaly and later to the Aegean islands
and the western coast of Asia Minor. As far as the evidence
goes, the Pelasgians came to Crete under the leadership
of Teutamos (corrupted into †Tektamos in most
manuscripts), who married the daughter of the Cretan king
Kretheus and with her begat Asterios, the father of the later
kings Minos, Rhadamanthys, and Sarpedon. 404 As king
Minos epitomizes the period of the Cretan thalassocracy,
the Pelasgian colonization of Crete must hence have occurred
before c. 1600-1450 BC. This emigration from
Thessaly to Crete can be backed up by toponymic evidence,
since the region of Gortyn in the Mesara plain is
characterized by a number of place names, like Lethaios,
Boibe, Magnesia, Phalanna, and Phaistos, which are also
recorded for Thessaly, whereas an alternative name of
Gortyn is Larisa – a typical Pelasgian place name. 405
Moreover, Gortyn itself is based on the same root as Thes-
402 Fourmont 1747: 254; Hitzig 1845; Chabas 1872: 296,
Lichtenberger 1911: 28; Macalister 1913: 2; Meyer 1928: 562;
Georgiev 1950-1: 137; Bérard 1951; Wainwright 1962: 151;
Kitchen 1973: 56; Albright 1975: 512; Strobel 1976: 159; Singer
1988: 241-2; for further literature, see Sakellariou 1977: 102, note
8.
403 Odyssey XIX, 177; note that, as argued in section 2, the mention
of the Dorians in this passage probably constitutes a later interpolation.
404 Andron of Halikarnassos in Strabo, Geography X, 4, 6; Diodoros
of Sicily, The Library of History IV, 60, 2; cf. ibid. V, 80, 1.
405 Fick 1905: 13-15; cf. Sakellariou 1977: 212; 137 (addition of
Pylros and Bn); for other instances of the place name Larisa
connected with Pelasgians – to which may be added Larision pedion
in the territory of Hierapytna on Crete (Fick 1905: 11) – , see
Strabo, Geography IX, 5, 6 and XIII, 3, 2 f.; cf. Sakellariou 1977:
133-4.