510 ANNUAL REPORT SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION, 1911. 
to Palestine at a comparatively late date; some even claim that they 
came later than the Jews.* ; 
If it is assumed that the weakening of the Egyptian supremacy in 
Syria and Canaan, in consequence of the repeated wars with the great 
Hittite kings, was taken advantage of by the island Philistines for 
carrying out their invasion and the establishment of the five Philis- 
tine principalities, and that some five decades later the influx of the 
Tsraelitish hordes followed, it may be clearly explained that in the 
meantime the products of the Philistine iron and steel industry were 
introduced and spread among their nearest neighbors, the Canaanites. 
The Israelites would therefore have learned to know, to admire, and 
to fear their weapons, while at the same time the more distant peo- 
ples, such as the Babylonians and Assyrians and the Egyptians, who 
carried on scarcely any foreign trade, must have remained in 
ignorance of them. 
Sober and intelligent research in this subject will certainly result in 
revealing many a grain of truth in the débris of the milleniums, and 
some important facts may even now be pointed out. Since the 
effectiveness of the scythe chariot, so much employed in ancient 
wars, depended upon the continued keenness of the blades, which 
could hardly be attained in bronze scythes, it seems to me scarcely 
subject to doubt that the inventors and propagators of the steel 
industry in Palestine were also the inventors and earliest constructors 
of the scythe chariot. The possession and employment of such 
deadly chariots must have materially aided the invading Philistines 
in the conquest of the coast land, for the Jews could hardly have been 
the only ones to be horror-stricken by these terrible slaughtering 
machines, so that, as they themselves often admit, they did not even 
venture into the valleys occupied by the Philistines, where alone could 
these scythe chariots be used to advantage. Among the Egyptian 
troops similar fear must have prevailed. We may therefore conclude 
that the Philistines at the period of the invasion of Palestine, in the 
thirteenth or fourteenth centuries B. C., introduced there a steel 
industry whose higher development must also have gone on for sev- 
eral centuries in their former settlements, probably on the island of 
Crete. On this assumption the beginnings of the steel industry 
would reach back into the first half of the second pre-Christian 
millenium, or to the period from 1800 to 1600 B. C. Moreover, it 
may be implied jfrom this that the beginnings of the manufacture of 
wrought-iron objects among the Philistines must at least be set in 
the second half of the third millenium B. C.; that is, that the 
working of iron was developed among the Philistines during a period 
considerably earlier than hitherto we have been inclined to assume. 
1 Thus M. Mueller, Asien and Europa, p. 388, lets them immigrate as late as about 1100 B. C., whichis, 
however, probably by 200 to 300 years too low, 
