Archaeologists are making some exciting discoveries at the ancient city of Gath in Southern Israel as they uncover some of the secrets of the people remembered in the Bible as the ultimate bad guys - the Philistines.
Around 3000 years ago, Gath was on the frontier between the Philistine and the Israelite territories. When David was on the run from King Saul, he tried to seek asylum at Gath by pretending to be mad. Gath, of course, is also famous for producing one of the biggest of the ‘bad guys’ in history in the giant Goliath.
The Philistines "are the ultimate other, almost, in the biblical story," Aren Maeir of Bar-Ilan University, the archaeologist in charge of the excavation, told the Associated Press.
Scholars now think the Philistines arrived by sea from the area of modern-day Greece around 1200 B.C. They went on to rule large parts of what is now Palestine and Israel, with most of their power centred around the Mediterranean coastal plain while Israel controlled the inland hills.
Archaeologists have discovered from the site of Gath that while the Philistines adopted aspects of local culture, they never forgot their roots as they still worshipped gods with Greek names five centuries after leaving Greece.
Archaeologists have also discovered that the Philistine diet was very similar to the Greeks, while evidence at Gath shows they ate pigs and dogs, which were considered unclean by the Israelites.
The archaeologists believe the city of Gath was destroyed sometime in the the 9th century B.C., an incident mentioned in the Book of Kings as being the work of the Aramean king Hazael.
"Gath fills a very important gap in our understanding of Philistine history," said Seymour Gitin, director of the W.F. Albright Institute of Archaeological Research in Jerusalem and an expert on the Philistines.
Nebuchadnezzar of Babylon stamped the Philistines out of history in 604 B.C. when he destroyed all the Philistine cities, after which no further evidence of them as a culture has been found.