People of the Sea: The Search for the Philistines.

• Author: Dever, William G.

Professors Trude and Moshe Dothan are two of Israel's best-known and most colorful archaeologists. She was long associated with the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and he with the University of Haifa and the Israel Department of Antiquities, both rising to the highest ranks. And each is a prominent field archaeologist, sometimes working together but often directing their own projects - many of which have produced critical new data for our understanding of the "Sea Peoples" of the eastern Mediterranean in the Early Iron Age, including the Biblical Philistines. In addition, Trude Dothan has devoted a lifetime's research to the subject - she published the standard scholarly work in 1982 under the title The Philistines and Their Material Culture (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press). Now, as the Dothans say in their introduction, they have decided to set themselves to the difficult task of producing a popular work on "the four-hundred-year-long history of Philistine archaeology and our own four decades of explorations and findings" (p. ix). They have succeeded admirably.

Part I, "The Enigma of the Philistines" (chapters 1-5; pp. 3-73), written jointly, traces the history of discovery and scholarship - from the University of Jena in 1693, where a group of local boors was apparently first labelled "Philistines" by the outraged university chaplain, to about 1940, when the main outlines of modern research had been set out. This amazing scholarly odyssey has never been told in full, and even the specialist in Syro-Palestinian archaeology will profit from seeing events connected in this way.

Part II, "Our Own Search Begins" (chapters 6-7; pp. 77-96), provides an intimate but modest portrait of the Dothans, own remarkable archaeological careers, set against the backdrop of tumultuous events in Palestine in the 1930s and 1940s and early Israeli statehood in the 1950s. Anyone who supposes that scholarly success comes easily should ponder this section.

Part III, "In the Footsteps of the Philistines" (chapters 8-10; pp. 99-126), by Moshe Dothan, chronicles his early excavations and surveys at small coastal sites, including Azor, and at Afula in the Jezreel Valley.

Part IV, "Digging Up Ashdod" (chapters 11-16; pp. 129-87), again by Moshe Dothan, is a relatively detailed account of his very important excavations between 1962 and 1972 at Ashdod, one of the cities of the Philistine pentapolis. Although five volumes of final site reports have appeared, and others are...