After about 1200 BC, the southwestern corner of the Mediterranean coast came under New Management. It had been Canaanite, ruled by Egyptians. Suddenly the cities, foodstuffs, and placenames changed. The Egyptians were still around-about, but now they were building fortresses to hem in the changelings.
I was on a dig in Ashqelon / Ascalan some decades ago. By then the neutron-activation method had come into its own; proving that a lot of Mycenaean "III-C" ware was produced on-site. The genetics are now in, and they're showing that the locals were heavily southern-European.
The wording of the research leans away from southern coastal Anatolia: whence the late "Hittite" states of Carchemish, and whence the Lycians. Ashqelonian DNA looks more like Caphtor / Crete.
We could propose that various Sea Peoples took over the region, each with its own language. Ashqelon - it's now all but proven - got the Greeks. Other nearby cities got the Valistinians (Ilya Yakubovich, "Phoenician and Luwian in Early Iron Age Cilicia"), speaking Anatolian. Maybe there were "Sherden" cities speaking old Sardinian. Maybe even Etruscans got involved, here as at contemporary Lemnos.
Etruscans, Archaic-era Greeks, and Carians did make themselves heard around the Eastern Med; they have certainly got themselves read, in their graffiti. But from 1200 to 800 BC, if you wanted to make a living in the Eastern Med, you had to learn Canaanite.
Once the Bible gets good and started, the Med coast is culturally "Philistine", but everyone there is already speaking "Hebrew". From a 1100 BC perspective, it's more like the "Philistines" are speaking the same foreign language which leftovers from the dead Egyptian empire were having to speak: Canaanite. 1100 BC sure wasn't 300 BC and it wasn't even 700 BC. The Bible's probably right.
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