Traditional Accounts
The Caphtorites are mentioned in the Table of Nations, Genesis 10:13-14 as one of several divisions of Mizraim (Egypt). This is reiterated in 1Chronicles 1:11-12 as well as later histories such as Josephus' Jewish Antiquities i.vi.2, which placed them explicitly in Egypt and the Sefer haYashar 10 which describes them living by the Nile.
Josephus (Jewish Antiquities I, vi) using extra-Biblical accounts provides context for the migration from Caphtor to Philistia. He records that the Caphtorites were one of the Egyptian peoples whose cities were destroyed during the Ethiopic War.
Tradition regarding the location of Caphtor was preserved in the Aramaic Targums and the commentary of Maimonides which place it at Caphutkia in the vicinity of Damietta (at the eastern edge of the Nile delta near classical Pelusium) and by the tenth century commentator Saadia Gaon and Benjamin of Tudela, the twelfth-century Jewish traveller from Navarre, who both wrote that Damietta was Caphtor.
The Midrash Rabbah on Genesis 37:5 (page 298 in the 1961 edition of Maurice Simon's translation) says that the "Caphtorim were dwarfs".
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