510 ANNUAL BEPORT SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION, 1911. 



to Palestine at a comparatively late date; some even claim that they 

 came later than the Jews. 1 



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 

 Israelitish 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 debris 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 [from 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. 



i Thus M. Mueller, Asien and Europa, p. 388, lets them immigrate as late as about 1100 B. C, which is, 

 however, probably by 200 to 300 years too low. 



