orce which was pressing
southward through Phoenicia towards the Egyptian frontier. These
events occurred at the beginning of the Homeric Age, and were followed
by the siege of Troy, which, according to the Greeks, began about 1194
B.C.

The land raiders who were thwarted by Rameses III were the
Philistines, a people from Crete.[417] When the prestige of Egypt
suffered decline they overran the coastline of Canaan, and that
country was then called Palestine, "the land of the Philistines",
while the Egyptian overland trade route to Phoenicia became known as
"the way of the Philistines". Their conflicts with the Hebrews are
familiar to readers of the Old Testament. "The only contributions the
Hebrews made to the culture of the country", writes Professor
Macalister, "were their simple desert customs and their religious
organization. On the other hand, the Philistines, sprung from one of
the great homes of art of the ancient world, had brought with them the
artistic instincts of their race: decayed no doubt, but still superior
to anything they met with in the land itself. Tombs to be ascribed to
them, found in Gezer, contained beautiful jewellery and ornaments. The
Philistines, in fact, were the only cultured or artistic race who ever
occupied the soil of Palestine, at least until the time when the
influence of classical Greece asserted itself too strongly to be
withstood. Whatsoever things raised life in the country above the dull
animal existence of fellahin were due to this people.... The peasantry
of the modern villages ... still tell of the great days of old when it
(Palestine) was inhabited by the mighty race of the 'Fenish'."[418]

When the Kassite Dynasty of Babylonia was extinguished, about 1140
B.C., the Amorites were being displaced in Palestine by the
Philistines and the Israelitish tribes; the Aramaeans were extending
their conquests in Syria and Mesopotamia; the Muski were the overlords
of the Hittites; Assyrian power was being revived at the beginning of
the second period of the Old Empire; and Egypt was governed by a
weakly king, Rameses VIII, a puppet in the hands of the priesthood,
who was unable to protect the rich tombs of the Eighteenth Dynasty
Pharaohs against the bands of professional robbers who were plundering
them.

A new dynasty--the Dynasty of Pashe--had arisen at the ancient
Sumerian city of Isin. Its early kings were contemporary with some of
the last Kassite monarchs, and they engaged in con