Whether they were driven eastward by drought, by the collapse of their economic world, by military defeat in their homelands, or by some combination of forces, they were moving because they had to.

The Egyptian records frame this as an invasion — a military threat to be repulsed.

And from Egypt’s perspective, that is what it was.

The Pharaoh’s duty was to protect Egypt, and Ramesses III fulfilled that duty.

But the people he was protecting Egypt against were, in many cases, people who had nowhere else to go.

Three thousand years later, when we can extract their descendants’ DNA from the soil of Ashkelon and compare it to the genomes of populations across the Mediterranean, we are looking at the biological signature of that ancient movement.

The Aegean ancestry in the Philistine genome is the molecular record of families who crossed the sea and built a new life on the Levantine coast.