The Uashasha
have been associated by Mr. H. R. Hall with the town of Axos, in
Crete. There remain the Pulosathu, who are, almost beyond question,
the Philistines, so well known to us from their connection with
the rise of the Hebrew monarchy. The Hebrew tradition brought the
Philistines from Kaphtor, and Kaphtor is plainly nothing else than
the Egyptian Kefti, or Keftiu. In the Philistines, then, we have
the last organized remnant of the old Minoan sea-power. Thrown
back from the frontier of Egypt by the victory of Ramses III.,
they established themselves on the maritime plain of Palestine,
where perhaps the Minoans had already occupied trading-settlements,
and there formed a community consisting of five cities, governed by
five confederate tyrants. No doubt they brought under and held in
subjection the ancient Canaanite population of the district, whom
they would rule as the Normans ruled the inhabitants of Sicily.
In the district which they governed, and especially at Tell-es-Safi
(Gath), Messrs. Bliss and Macalister have discovered many specimens
of pottery which is obviously Cretan of the Third Late Minoan period,
together with ware which is local in the sense of having been
manufactured on the spot, but is quite certainly Late Minoan also
in its design and decoration.
So, then, the nation with which we have all been familiar from the
earliest days of childhood as the hated rival of the young Hebrew
state, whose wars with the Hebrews are the subject of so many of
the heroic stories of Israel's Iron Age, was the last survival of
the great race of Minos.
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