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Rh struggle with the Philistines, an Indo-European people from the Aegean who had seized the south Syrian coast and gave the whole country its permanent name, Palestine. From the coastal strip they worked their way inland, capturing many Canaanite towns and disarming the populace. The numerous punitive expeditions and severe exactions of successive Pharaohs had impoverished Syria and weakened its resistance to the onslaught of desert hordes as well as sea rovers. Neither Philistines nor Hebrews would have had such success in gaining a firm foothold in the land, had imperial Egypt still been able to exercise full control over it.

What gave the Philistines special advantage over their enemies was their superiority of armour, which depended upon knowledge of the smelting and use of iron for weapons of defence and offence. Prior to their advent, Hittites had made rare use of iron, but it did not become common in Syria until the arrival of the Philistines, who jealously guarded the secrets of its processing. It was not until the time of David in the tenth century that knowledge of the complicated process was acquired by the Hebrews, as well as by the Phoenicians, who learned to utilize iron in building ships. Thus the greatest Philistine contribution was the raising of Syrian culture from the bronze stage to that of iron. Beyond that and a few traces of material culture in the form of pottery, agricultural implements and iron adzes and chisels, the Philistines left hardly a relic by which they may be remembered. As a foreign community they had no guarantee of permanency except through continued replenishment of their blood by immigration, an impossibility under the then existing conditions. Towards the end of David's reign they tend to disappear as a colony. In due course they were Semitized and assimilated, leaving very little by which their language, religion, architecture and other aspects of their higher life could be determined.

Resistance to the Philistines led to the creation of the Hebrew monarchy, with which the history of the Hebrews Rh