Bronze Age Canaan: Egyptian Hegemony (1457–1157 BC)
--
In the late 16th Century BC, the entities that make up modern-day Egypt underwent a process of political consolidation into what we call today the “New Kingdom.” The New Kingdom expanded rapidly, and in 1457 BC, under Pharaoh Thutmose III, they defeated a confederation of Canaanite tribes at the Battle of Megiddo. For almost 300 years following Megiddo, the peoples of Canaan were vassals of the Pharaohs.
Being a subject of the Pharaoh could be brutal, especially if a Pharaoh was in the mood to assert his authority. Indeed, the first written use of the name “Israel” of which archaeologists are aware comes from Victory Stele of the Pharaoh Merneptah, in which the Pharaoh bragged about various rebellions he quashed around 1210 BCE:
The Canaan has been plundered into every sort of woe:
Ashkelon has been overcome;
Gezer has been captured;
Yano’am is made non-existent.
Israel is laid waste and his seed is not;
But after 1200 BCE, something — nobody is quite sure what — happened in the Near East. Wikipedia has this to say:
Between 1206 and 1150 BC, the cultural collapse of the Mycenaean kingdoms, the Hittite Empire in Anatolia and Syria, and the New Kingdom of Egypt in Syria and Canaan interrupted trade routes and severely reduced literacy…. [Robert] Drews writes, “Within a period of forty to fifty years…almost every significant city in the eastern Mediterranean world was destroyed, many of them never to be occupied again.”
Whether by cause or effect, this collapse coincided with the arrival of the “Sea Peoples,” a number of Mediterranean tribes that invaded and settled in the Near East. The best known of these tribes was the Peleset; in the Hebrew alphabet, this would have been written as PLST, which was likely pronounced “Pilisti”, and ultimately became rendered most familiarly as “Philistines.”
