Unearthed bones bring Philistines to life
Hidden in the soil of Ashkelon, an Israeli seaport 35 miles south of Tel Aviv, are secrets from the ancient world that Harvard scholars have been uncovering for decades. Not very long ago, they struck a treasure trove of bones. “It was just a goldmine of a cemetery,” said Daniel Master, an archaeology professor at Wheaton College in Illinois and a co-director of the Harvard-backed Leon Levy Expedition to Ashkelon, which carried out the first-ever excavation of a Philistine burial ground, found at the site in 2013. “Every kind of idea we would want was there.” For years archaeologists have searched for the origins of the Philistines, famously known, via the Hebrew Bible, as the archenemy of ancient Israel. The cemetery both shines an important light on the group’s history and sets their ancient burial record straight. Adam Aja, assistant director of the Leon Levy Expedition to Ashkelon and assistant curator at the...