Archaeology has brought the Philistines to life more vividly than perhaps any other Biblical people save the Israelites and the Egyptians.^a We now know that the Philistines were one of the Sea Peoples that also included the Tjeker, the Denyen (or Danuna), the Shardana and the Weshesh. At the very beginning of the 12th century B.C.—the beginning of the period archaeologists call Iron Age I—the Sea Peoples swept out of the Aegean to make their appearance in the archaeological record and in ancient literary references.