As Canaanite Ashkelon prospered, its army grew strong. Historians have long known that around 1650 b.c. a mysterious group of warriors called the Hyksos invaded the Nile Delta and ruled it for a century. No one knew where the Hyksos, which means "foreign rulers" in ancient Egyptian, came from. Recent excavations at Avaris, the Hyksos capital in Egypt, have produced artifacts identical to those found in Ashkelon, leading Stager to propose that the Hyksos were actually Canaanites and that many came from around Ashkelon.

Even before the Hyksos conquered the delta, the Egyptians were having trouble with the Canaanites. Pharaohs of the 12th dynasty (1938-1755 b.c.) cursed three kings of Ashkelon in so-called execration texts. Scribes would write the names of the kings on ceramic bowls or human figurines, and the pharaoh would smash them to magically destroy their power.

We have an idea what the Canaanites looked like from artwork painted on an Egyptian wall around 1900 b.c. that depicts Canaanite dignitaries visiting the pharaoh. They had Semitic facial features and dark hair, which the women wore in long tresses and the men styled in mushroom-shaped bundles on top of their heads. The men had trimmed beards. Both sexes wore bright red and yellow clothes—long dresses for the women and kilts for the men.

Around 1550 b.c. the Egyptians expelled the Hyksos and for more than 300 years dominated Canaan, the land from present-day Lebanon to the Sinai. Beginning in the late 13th century, numerous groups of invaders threw the entire eastern Mediterranean into turmoil. Around 1175 one group, the Philistines, conquered Ashkelon and established at least four other major cities in the region, which became known as Philistia—echoed still in the name Palestine.

Because their pottery and other artifacts resemble those of the Mycenaean Greeks, the warriors who sacked Troy in the Homeric legends, Stager believes that the Philistines were in fact immigrant Greeks. The Philistine hero Goliath, says Stager, wore Mycenaean-style battle gear. The biblical Samson, he adds, behaved like the legendary Greek superhuman Heracles. And Samson's loss of strength after the Philistine woman Delilah cut his hair parallels an earlier Greek myth.

Analysis of animal bones found in Philistine Ashkelon indicates that the newcomers ate a lot of pigs, an unusual practice in Canaanite times but very common among early Greeks.

"I think pork became taboo among the Israelites," says Stager, "in part because that helped set them off from their archenemies—those uncircumcised Philistines."

The Bible is the only lengthy written source on the Philistines, and since the Israelites waged war with their neighbors for two centuries, the name Philistine became a synonym for unsophisticated and boorish people. But the excavations at Ashkelon and other Philistine sites have turned up evidence that they were actually quite cosmopolitan, fond of artful pottery, and distillers of fine wine.

Still, much remains to be learned, and the Philistines are now the primary focus at Ashkelon, mainly because the team is digging in the levels that date close to the time they arrived. Stager hopes soon to find a layer of destruction—charred wood and ruins—that would signal the burning of the Canaanite city when the Philistines invaded. Stager takes me to grid 38, which at about an acre in size is the largest site on the dig. Here the team is closest to the earliest Philistines.

"These are all Philistine streets," says Stager as we walk through a complex of foundations of mud-brick buildings from the 12th century b.c. In earlier seasons at this grid the team excavated a commercial building from the seventh century b.c. that measured 90 feet (27 meters) by 36 feet (11 meters). Stager suspects that it was a winery with storehouses.

This season has brought more clues to Philistine traditions—a pot with the bones of a puppy inside. Buried beneath the foundations of a building, the find intrigues a team of animal-bone specialists headed by Paula Wapnish of the University of Alabama. "We think that somebody killed it, put it in the pot, and placed it into a pit in the ground," explains a team member, Brian Hesse. "The pot has char marks. I think someone was probably cooking the puppy for food but never came back for it."

Or, counters Stager, the puppy was buried in an already charred pot as an offering to bring good fortune to the building.

Shortly before we arrived at grid 38, excavators had turned up another Philistine burial. In the corner of one room Lev-Tov sits carefully brushing dirt from the skeleton of a human infant that had been buried in a pit. The tiny brown bones and skull barely emerge from the earth that has so long encased them.