Ashqelon's final garrison

I didn't dig at the fun part of Ashqelon. The fun part was the Late Iron Age souk down by the beach. I'm checking in on the current consensus of Ashqelon's final days.

The market has Greek pottery in it. Thus it represents an apparent resurgence of the old Aegean / Canaanite connection that characterises the early "Philistine" era. Alexander Fantalkin argued instead, in "Why Did Nebuchadnezzar II Destroy Ashkelon?", that the pottery findings are overblown - as a trend. Rather, they tell an actual story.

Per Le-ma'an Ziony's "Ekron of the Philistines": when Babylon sicced its Medean allies upon the Assyrian Empire, this left a vacuum from Syria to lower Egypt. This broke up the Assyrian trade-network such that what many cities had come to specialise in, were now useless. Ekron's economy collapsed. Fantalkin - from other indications - found similar in Ashqelon. That market was new, when the Babylonians crashed the party 604 BC.

As to what the Greekware was doing there, Fantalkin argued that its was to serve - primarily - Greeks. The Greeks were doing better than they had done, say, in 704 BC; but still, they were hardly Pericleians (yet). Fantalkin then analogised to Mezad Chashabiah (Hashabyahu) and our good friend Tel Kabri, which also had Greekware, that these were mercs.

The Swiss Guard aside, sensible nations don't hire mercs for longer than they must. Somebody was backstopping a strategic point. That somebody, Fantalkin noted for Mezad Chashabiah, was Egypt. It was probably Egypt here too. One assumes Egypt had d00dz in Gaza as well.

With at least three Egyptian garrisons not including Gaza, the Babylonians - considering themselves Assyria's heirs - would have their pretext to swoop down on the whole coast. The Egyptians would try to get some of that back but LOL.