Amedeo

Some time ago I started making a study of mythological books such as The Odyssey, the Gospels, and the Bible. Some of my studies of the Bible appear in the following threads, which I cite, since I am not going to repeat them. They are original but incomplete studies, investigations rather than dogmatic exigeses, about which I have not seen any intelligent, learned, discussion or criticism. So, usually I end up building on, and correcting, what I write, since many readers just can't get into the subjects which I treat.

I Need Backup
http://www.iidb.org/vbb/showthread.p...48#post4412148
Chiefs and Their Councils
http://www.iidb.org/vbb/showthread.p...03#post4397303
The Greek and Levantine Essenes
http://www.iidb.org/vbb/showthread.p...28#post4419728
Genesis:1 or Foreign Elohim?
http://www.iidb.org/vbb/showthread.p...73#post4386513
Pyramids and All That
http://www.iidb.org/vbb/showthread.p...36#post4433236

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The Philistines are named in the Bible in the context of the Table of Nations generated by Noah's sone after the Flood. I am not going to discuss again the Table, its confusions about various ethnic people we know from other sources, its claiming that each people or clan had its own language at a time (before the Tower of Babel incident, when mankind allegedly had only one language ), and so forth.

According to the Table (in Genesis:10), the Philistines are NOT one of the Peoples or Nations that were established before The Tower incident or, apparently before Abraham (some 320 years later). In the New International version of the Bible, there is a parenthetical phrase after Casluhites and 4 other peoples, and before Caphtorites, which says, "(from whom the Philistines came)." Probably the parenthetical explanation was added to the oral account when it was written down. Nobody can be sure, but it makes it certain that the Philistines are not one people generated by Ham. At the same time, the posited descendance of the Philistines from Ham does not imply that they were real descendants of a certain Ham, anymore that the [Indo-European] Hittite could have been the descendants of a certain Canaan, or brothers of the Jesubites and the Amorites. (The Table of nation is simply not a page of human history. The composer of the Tables knew hardly anything about most of the peoples who were neatly placed in a dynastic genealogy. History, not I, is the exposer of the nature of the Table.)

(Cf.Wikipedia The name "PHILISTINES" = Hebrew PLISHTIM. They are mentioned in Egypt, in the Medinet Habu inscription (near Thebes) of about 1190 B.C., as the PRST or PELESET. The name occurs in Assyrian inscriptions as PALASTU and PILISTA.

There are various indications that the Philistines in question may have been people in different parts of the world: the Philistines who eventually survived in a portion of the ancient territory called by the Romans Palestine, who lost their independence to Assyria in about 732 B.C.; a contingent of the Sea People, the Peleset, who, along the Shardana, came from western and southern Anatolia [today's Turkey]; and possibly similar ethnic people with similar or some wholly different names. (For example, in my most recent study, I indicated that the Median -- a country or region to which Moses fled after murdering an Egyptian, as per "Exodus" -- was a proto-Greek or Philistine People outside Egypt-occupied Canaan, southern Philistines, and Phoenicia.)

In the article "Caphtor," Wikipedia notes:

This may well be that there were different breeds of so-called Philistines. Logically, for the Bible believers, they are later descendants of the 3 sons of Noah, while the recent etymologies which start with the Elohim and Yaweh reveal a pre-history of the catalogued Nations which the real people living around the times of the Santorini explosion and inundations never suspected, nor do most people today. (A secret: the history of the Middle East is not the one told by the Bible.)

The same article states:

Since Ham's son, Mizraim, is identified with Egypt, the inevitable occurs: all the Philistines (and their fathers) descend from Egypt. So, it never dawns on the writers that according to the Egyptians, some Philistines were Sea people from outside Egypt... and that the Shemites are brothers of the Canaanites, neither of which is a brother of the Egyptians. [The Table of Nations has no conception of the real different ethnic groups that involve different gods, language, and distinctive customs. Its confusion is greater than the one that occurred at the Tower.]

In the midst of this great confusion, a city on the eastern extreme of the Nile's Delta, Pelusium (Greek Pelousion, Sebrew Sin, Aramaic Seyan), whose Greek "pelou-" denotes mud or clay, so that pelousion = a mud-city, is identified with Caphutkia (as the city of the Caphorites). The Targums and Tuleda make these identifications on the basis of some divine revelations, since Pelusium or its variants are definetely NOT cognates of Caphutkia. Probably they argued that since the Philistines must be Egyptian derivatives, and since the Philistines must come out of Caphtor, then Caphtor/Caphutkia must be identical with Pelusium. If this were not enough: Caphutkia resemble the Egyptian Keftiu. Wait a moment. How does this confirm that Caphutkia is Pelusion? (Nonsenses never end.)

In this passage, we see something in the right direction:

Quote:

The Septuagint translates it [Kaphtukia] as "Kappadokias" and similarly the Vulgate renders it as "Cappadocia" which are understood to refer to the same location. Nevertheless, the seventeenth-century scholar Samuel Bochart[2] understood these to be references to Cappadocia in Anatolia. Modern commentators and translators commonly identify it with Crete (Hertz 1936) although it has also been linked to Cyprus, and the nearby coasts of Anatolia. By some accounts,[citation needed] both Cyprus and Crete together were known as "the isles of the Caphtorim".

I would complete this thought thus: "Kaphthukia" is a proto-Greek word which occurs also ouside the Middle East proper, namely in Cyprus and Crete.
The Caphtorim were Levantine proto-Greeks, who at some time or other were also called Philistines.
The etym is preserved in the Greek toponym in Euboia: Kaphere^us (a promontory with a conspicuous height -- good for sighting and for a lighthouse/firehouse) and in certain heights by the sea of Magna Graecia [Southern Italy] (as in my hometown's "cafarune.")

Here is the whole Wikipedia text for a comfortable perusal:

Amedeo

Biblical Egypt

In hieroglyphs, Egypt was called Km.t [Kemet], which denoted the fertile black soil along the Nile river.

Egypt < (Latin Aegyptus < Greek Aigyptos. The name, in the masculine, was also used for the Nile river. Nobody seems to know what the word means or where it came from. Strabo speculated that it denoted the land "below the Aegean (Sea)" wherefore he derived Aigyptos from Aigaiou + Yptio^s [= ... of the Aegean]. We have the Greek adjective Yptios or Yptioo^, but Yptio^s is an unknown noun formation. At any rate, "the below [land] of the Aegean" seems to be rather strange. (The combination of Ypo + Aigaion would have been more normal.)

A village in Etolia used to be called Aigition [= Egyptian or Little Egypt]. A city and a river in Thrace used to be called Aigos. And a city in Achaean country was called Aigion. So, all of these words point to a common etym which is not the combination of "aegean" and something else. Finally, we have the word AIGYPIOS ( a variant of Gups/Gypos), which means Vulture. So, it seems that AIGYPTOS is a word affine to AIGYPIOS, with a related meaning.

(From Wikipedia) The Biblical word for Egypt, MIZRAIM or Misraim [MSRM], is NOT related to either Kemet or Aigyptos. It is a Canaanite (Ugaritic) name: MSRM or Misri, which occurs in Assyrian and Babylonian records as Musur and Musri.

Ugaritic and Eblaite records predate the Bible, which actually starts with the Ugaritic polytheism of the Elohim but retains only the two supreme gods quickly to be reduced to El. So, the composer of the Table of the Nations after Noah employs names which were in use before Noah. The very name "Mizraim" is supposed to be the name of one of the sons of Noah who, like the others, gave his personal name to the People of Country that was founded. But apparently, "Mizraim" means the double or twin land (the united Egypt), as it must have been understood in Ugarit. The name of the land came first, and the Bible narrator invented a person, a son of Noah, with the name of that land to make him the ancestor of that land.

I have already indicated elsewhere that, from the standpoint of our historical/ethnological knowledge, Egypt and Canaan were NOT brotherly Peoples or Countries. They are so conceived only in the Table of the Nations, as they are made to descend from Ham or Kham.

There is a Greek etym, Khama- or Kham- [chi, alpha, etc.] that occurs in very many words: It denotes Ground (or soil) or Low Land. So, for instance Khamai (Latin Humi) = on the ground. It is a geographical term, not a personal name, but, like the Latin Homo, the Biblical Hebrew Ham/Kham, would generically designate a man of the soil or a man of the low land, which is amenable to cultivation and irrigation. (I submit that the Greek word belongs to the linguistic subtrate of Canaan and the whole Levant. Classical Greek developed around the Aegean, after its Levantine-Anatolian archaic phase; it's not the case that a lot of Greek words were imported into the Levant from Greece. Yah/Yahweh is one of the substrate names, as I have shown many times.)

Huon

The vulture was the symbol of Upper Egypt. Pharaohs wore the uraeus (cobra) and the head of a vulture on their foreheads as symbols of royal protection. The goddess Nekhbet was also portrayed as a vulture.

Amedeo

Right! And I was not even thinking of that!
A variety of Greek-related Latin terms are used in the modern nomenclature for vultures...
http://www.nefertiti.iwebland.com/bestiary/vulture.htm

Amedeo

An additional thread
Elohim, Yahweh, God, Trinity

http://www.iidb.org/vbb/showthread.p...46#post4380146