Peleset

The Peleset (Ancient Egyptian: pwrꜣsꜣtj) or Pulasati are a people appearing in fragmentary historical and iconographic records in ancient Egyptian from the Eastern Mediterranean in the late 2nd millennium BCE. They are hypothesised to have been one of the several ethnic groups of which the invading Sea Peoples were said to be composed. Today, historians generally identify the Peleset with the Philistines.

A Peleset and a Sherden prisoner being led by an Egyptian soldier under Ramesses III, Medinet Habu temple

Records

Very few documentary records exist, both for the Peleset and for the other groups hypothesized as Sea Peoples. One group of people recorded as participating in the Battle of the Delta were the Peleset; after this point in time, the "Sea Peoples" as a whole disappear from historical records, the Peleset being no exception. Archaeological evidence supports the existence of a migration of Peleset/Philistines from the Aegean into the southern Levant.^[1]

The five known sources are below:

• c. 1150 BCE: Mortuary Temple of Ramesses III: records a people called the P-r-s-t (conventionally Peleset) among those who fought against Egypt in Ramesses III's reign.^[2][3]
• c. 1150 BCE: Papyrus Harris I: I extended all the boundaries of Egypt; I overthrew those who invaded them from their lands. I slew the Denyen in their isles, the Thekel and the Peleset (Pw-r-s-ty) were made ashes.^[4][5]
• c. 1150 BCE: Rhetorical Stela to Ramesses III, Chapel C, Deir el-Medina.^[6]
• c. 1000 BCE: Onomasticon of Amenope: Sherden, Tjekker, Peleset, Khurma.^[7][5]
• c. 900 BCE: Padiiset's Statue, inscription: envoy – Canaan – Peleset.^[8]

In some translations of the Hebrew bible (Exodus 15:14), the word Palaset is used to describe either the Philistines or Palestina.^[9][10] In the King James bible, it is translated as Palestina.^[11]

Identity and origins

A "prisoner tile" of Ramesses III depicting a Peleset (left) and an Amorite (right)

Today, historians generally identify the Peleset with the Philistines, or rather, vice versa.^[3] The origins of the Peleset, like much of the Sea Peoples, are not universally agreed upon – with that said, scholars have generally concluded that the bulk of the clans originated in the greater Southern European area, including western Asia Minor, the Aegean, and the islands of the Mediterranean.^[12] Fellow Sea Peoples clans have likewise been identified with various Mediterranean polities, to varying acceptance: the Ekwesh with the Achaeans, the Denyen with the Danaans, the Lukka with the Lycians, the Shekelesh with the Sicels, the Sherden with the Sardinians, etc.

Older sources sometimes identify the Peleset with the Pelasgians. However, this identification has numerous problems and is usually disregarded by modern scholars. A major issue is the etymological difficulties of the "g" in "Pelasgians" becoming a "t" in the Egyptian translation, especially as the Philistine endonym already corresponded to the form P-L-S-T and therefore required no such modification to be rendered as Peleset in the Egyptian language.^[13]

Historian Jan Dressen has proposed that the name Peleset should be identified as an ethnonym for the inhabitants of the Bronze Age city of Pyla on Cyprus, for which he reconstructs a Linear B reading as *pu-ra-wa-tu/Pyla-wastu. Dressen suggests that the Peleset migration to the Levant could be linked with the occupation and abandonment of Pyla, which occurred around the time span described by the Medinet Habu reliefs.^[14]

See also

• Timeline of the name Palestine