on conçoit que ces hommes, qui, dans tous les temps, se montrèrent avides de pillage,
avaient, de bonne heure, parcouru l’Afrique pour y excercer leurs brigandages. Que,
se trouvant attiré par l’appât des richesses de l’Egypte, ils aient tenté une incursion
dans cette contrée, et réussi à s’en rendre maîtres, la chose n’a rien d’improbable.
C’est ainsi qu’à des époques plus récentes nous voyons les Mazices, qui appartenaient
à la même race, infester'par leurs brigandages l’Egypte et les contrées voisines.”
The Shillouhs (sufficiently for the purposes of this essay) have now been started in
Morocco and followed to the confines of Egypt. In these wildernesses some of their
advanced posts still reside. At the famed oasis of Jupiter Ammon, or Seewàh, the
same phenomenon is witnessed at the present day for which this oasis was remarkable
in the time of Herodotus, viz : the intermixture of Egyptian andBerber tribes. And
just as its habitants then spoke Coptic and “ Ethiopian” dialects, so now their speech
is Arabic and Shilha; i. e., the tongue of the Shillouhs ; into which latter idioms
Arabic continues to become the more and more absorbed, in proportion as from oasis
to oasis one journeys westwards ; until, little beyond words impressed with religious
attributes remains of Arabic in the aboriginal tongue of the Shillouh votary of IsIàm.
The KSAiLuKA-im of Xth Genesis resolve themselves, once for all, into the Shil-
l o t j h s ; one of the two main branches of the great Gætulian or Libyan family,! race,
or perhaps “ species,” of mankind. They inhabited Barbary when the ethnic chart
of Hamitic stocks was compiled. They do so stilly in the nineteenth century a . g .616
83. D * n — PALSTilM — 4 Philistim.’
None will dispute that, according to the Text and the versions, these people proceed
' from out of the KSAiLou-KA-im. Ergo, the Philisûm were of Berber stock, and must
have migrated from a Gætulian birthplace into Palestine ; a land which, to this day,
cohsecrates in its name the remembrance of one of its earliest occupants, the Philistines.
Contrary to the general current of opinion, here we encounter, if the ethnic- genealogies
of Xth Genesis are historical (as we conceive them to be), a migration from
Northern Africa to Asia; that is, from West to East. If we are to be told by “ teolo-
gastri,” that a man yclept Casluhim, on his way from Mount Ararat to Mount Atlas,
was delivered in Palestine of another called Philistim, St. Augustine will reply for us
“ credo, quia impossibile.” Can it be shown when the “ Philistines” were not in
Palestine?
The PALSTMM were in Palestine before the second Pylon of the temple,of Medeenet-
Haboo was erected at Thebes ; else Ramses III. could not have recorded, in the thirteenth
century b . c,, “ the POLISITE,” among his Asiatic vanquished ; by all hiero-
logists recognized as the Philistines. They must have been also settled in Palestine
before the advent of the Abrahamidoe, whose presence the Philistines never quietly
tolerated ; and these Philistines were sufficiently powerful, at the time of the Exode,
for Israel’s escaping helots to prefer a wearisome desert march by. the Sinaic
route, lest, peradventure the latter should “ see war;.” if their valor had tested the
right of way through “ the land of the PALSTtf-fora, although that was near.” And,
in their uncompromising abhorrence of later Hebrew domination (which they successfully
resisted until Nabuchadnezzar crushed alike the intruder and themselves) the
Philistines never belied their Berber antipathies to an alien yoke. AXAo^uAot, Emigrants,
themselves, they seem never to have comprehended the legality of the charter through
which other strangers in the same land claimed its exclusive possession : nor did Jewish
holders of this supernatural title-deed,ever collect physical force adequate to an eviction.
Leaving aside, as Pundit fabrications, those Sanscrit apocryphas through which Wil-
ford traced Palestine to Pali-stàn, “ country of the P a li” (Hales’s endorsement notwithstanding)
; and by no means prepossessed in favor of any Sanscrit etymology,for
descendants of Hamitic Shillouhs in Palestine or elsewhere, after Quatremère’s exposure
of their impossibility— leaving aside all these Indomanias, we turn to the Abbé
Mignot for some reasonable derivation of PLSTtf.
PLS, or Felesh, in Hebrew means mud'; Nand the same bisyllable resiles from the
Greek -nrjXog, and the Latin Palus.- Pelusiim, frontier city of Lower Egypt, towards
Palestine (surrounded by marshes at the Pelusiac mouth), derived its foreign name
from its muddy situation ; being called SIN, mud, in Ezekiel (xxx. 15, 16), and Teeneh,
mud, by the present Arabs. These coincidences, coupled with the fact that the P L S T i
dwelt between Pelusium and Palestine, led the ingenious Abbé to see, in the miry
neighborhoods of their abode, the origin of the name Philistine. On the other hand,
Munk draws the name from E L S , to emigrate ; being the sense in which the LXX
understood PLSTi-îm, when they rendered it by a\\o<pvXot. Munk supports this hypothesis
by the Ethiopie name of Jewish Abyssinians, the E a l a s h a s , or emigrants, if their
name be Semitic.
These appear to be the most rational etymologies of many producible upon the old
system, before hieroglyphics were translated ; or rather, in Munk’s instance, before
rumors of Egyptian translations had reached an erudite Conservator of the Royal Library
at Paris, even in 1845. Such attempts at solution must be abortive,, because,
revolving within a vicious and narrow circle of ideas, they all lean upon Hebraical
explanations of that which the Hebraicized “ language of Kanaan ” cannot explain ;
and for the following reason : —
Upon Egyptian monuments, at a date long anterior to the compilation of Xth Genesis
(never supposed by-us to be Mosaic), the P L S T i - l m are recorded. Their name is orthographed
“ POLISaTE — men and women.” Allowing vowels to be as vague in hieroglyphics
as every one knows they are in Hebrew, here, notwithstanding, is à word of
three- or four syllables, represented by at least four radical letters, P, L, S, T ; as well
in the old Egyptian as in the very modern square-leiter calligraphy. To this primitive
name the Jews added IM, in order to make their plural, PLSTi-^m ; the Philist-ines :
which word by the Masora is read Phelesheth in the singular; the final letter “ tau”
being inherent: that is, the T was already inseparable from the name thus chronicled
at Thebes some three to more centuries before the consolidation of the Hebrew language
itself; taking Solomon’s era as the earliest and the-Captivity as the latest points
for pure Hebrew literaturè. This historical fact thrust before them, rabbinical scholars
must pause, and. settle with comparative philology the vital question of biliterals
and monosyllables, ere they can make Egyptologists concede that the triliteral P L S ,
or PLS, is the root, not of a Semitic, but of an Hamitic nomen of this Barbaresque
affiliation of the KSiLouKA-£m; because, in the Hamitic “ language of KNAâN”
(falsely called Hebrew) ; in cognate Berber tongues ; and in old Egyptian ; the prefix
P, PA, F, no less than its Berber gradation into OU, wa, w, &c., is almost invariably
the masculine article the, put before the noun it determines. We hold, therefore, that
the hieroglyphical POLISiTE is “ ¿ A e - O L I S z T E , ” or something similar ; and while we
pretend not to know either the meaning or the vowelled phoneftism of this noun, the
présence of the article P hatchets away such fabulous etymons as PLS. mud, or E L S .
stranger. It remains for Berber scholars to discover nominal origins of the P-OLISzTE
among families of the Gætulian race : our part contents itself with suggesting two
indications supplied by Quatremère : —
lat. A s h d o d , Azotus, was one of the five great cities of Philistia. In the time of
Nehemiah (xiii. 23, 24), after return' from Captivity, “ the Jews had married wives of
Ashdod,” and “ their children spak'e half in the speech of Ashdod, and could not speak
in the Jews’ language.”
It is true that the Jews, (who, considering the sanctity of their lineage, have amazingly
surpassed all nations in rapidity of linguistic mutation,) in the days of Nehemiah
'spoke Chaldee; but, it would appear from the context that Hebrew, i. e. the
“ speech of Kanaan,” was the tongue which their “ Pasha” (PKAH) sought to reinstil
into them by means vehement, not to say singular. “ I contended with them, and
cursed them, and smote certain of them; and plucked out their hair !” says Nehemiah
(xiii. 25).