The Canaanites part 1

by John Thomas Lowe
(Woodruff, S.C.)

The Canaanites

Who Were the Canaanites?
The Canaanites lived in the land of Canaan, an area which, according to ancient texts, may have included parts of modern-day Israel, Palestine, Lebanon, Syria, and Jordan.
Much of what scholars know about the Canaanites comes from records left by the people they contacted. Some of the most detailed surviving records come from the site of Amarna in Egypt and the Hebrew Bible. Additional information comes from excavations of archaeological sites that the Canaanites are thought to have lived in.
Scholars doubt that the Canaanites were ever politically united into a single kingdom. In fact, archaeological excavations indicate that the "Canaanites" were different ethnic groups. During the Late Bronze Age (1550-1200 B.C.), "Canaan was not made up of a single 'ethnic' group but consisted of a population whose diversity may be hinted at by the great variety of burial customs and cultic structures," wrote an archaeology professor.

Canaanite languages
• Phoenician
• Ammonite
• Moabite
• Hebrew
• Edomite

Canaan (the country or area)/Canaanites (the people), was a Semitic-speaking civilization and region in the Ancient Near East during the late 2nd millennium B.C. The word "Canaanites" serves as an ethnic catch-all term covering various indigenous populations—both settled and nomadic-pastoral groups—throughout the regions of the southern Levant or Canaan, which relate to or denote a family of languages that includes Hebrew, Arabic, and Aramaic and specific ancient languages such as Phoenician and Akkadian, constituting the central subgroup of the Afro-Asiatic family. Canaan had significant geopolitical importance in the Late Bronze Age Amarna Period (14th century B.C.), where the spheres of interest of the Egyptian, Hittite, Mitanni, and Assyrian Empires converged or overlapped. Much of present-day knowledge about Canaan stems from archaeological excavation in this area at sites such as Tel Hazor, Tel Megiddo, En Esur, and Gezer.
The name "Canaan" appears throughout the Bible, where it corresponds to "the *Levant," in particular to the areas of the Southern Levant that provide the main settings of the narratives of the Bible: the Land of Israel, Philistia, and Phoenicia, that is, the countries bordering on the eastern Mediterranean Sea — often thought of as extending from Greece to Egypt. It is by far the most frequently used ethnic term in the Bible. The Book of Joshua includes Canaanites in a list of nations to exterminate, and scripture elsewhere portrays them as a group that the Israelites had annihilated.
Biblical scholars note that archaeological data suggests "that the Israelite culture largely overlapped Canaanite culture and was derived from Canaanite culture." In short, Israelite culture was largely Canaanite in nature." The name "Canaanites" is confirmed, many centuries later, as the *endonym of the people later known to the Ancient Greeks from c. 500 BC as Phoenicians, and after the emigration of some Canaanite-speakers to Carthage (founded in the 9th century B.C.), was also used as a self-designation by the *Punics (as "Chanani") of North Africa during Late Antiquity.
*endonym ─ A name used by a group or category of people to refer to themselves or their language, as opposed to a name given to them by another group

*Punics ─ The Punics were a Semitic-speaking people from Carthage in North Africa who traced their origins to Phoenicians and North
ETYMOLOGY
The etymology is uncertain. An early explanation derives the term from the Semitic root, "to be low, humble, subjugated." Some scholars have suggested that this implies an original meaning of "lowlands," unlike Aram, which means "highlands." In contrast, others have suggested it meant "the subjugated," which was the name of Egypt's province in the Levant and similarly evolved into the proper name to Provincia Nostra (the first Roman colony north of the Alps, which became Provence).
Overview
There are several periodization systems for Canaan. One of them is the following.
o Prior to 4500 BC (prehistory – Stone Age): hunter-gatherer societies slowly gave way to farming and herding societies;
o 4500–3500 BC (Chalcolithic): early metalworking and farming
o 3500–2000 B.C. (Early Bronze): prior to written records in the area
o 2000–1550 BC (Middle Bronze): city-states
o 1550–1200 BC (Late Bronze): Egyptian domination
After the Iron Age, the periods are named after the various empires that ruled the region: Assyrian, Babylonian, Persian, Hellenistic (related to Greece), and Roman.
Canaanite culture developed in situ (in the natural or original position or place.) from multiple waves of migration merging with the earlier Circum-Arabian Nomadic Pastoral Complex, which in turn developed from a fusion of their ancestral Natufian (Relating to or denoting a late Mesolithic culture of the Middle East, dated to about 12,500–10,000 years ago. It provides evidence for the first settled villages. The use of microliths characterizes it and of bone for implements.) and Harifian cultures (Harifian is a specialized regional cultural development of the Epipalaeolithic ─ of the Negev Desert. It corresponds to the latest stages of the Natufian culture with Pre-Pottery Neolithic B (PPNB) farming cultures, practicing animal domestication, during the 6200 BC climatic crisis which led to the Neolithic Revolution/First Agricultural Revolution in the Levant. Pre-Pottery Neolithic B (PPNB) is part of the Pre-Pottery Neolithic, a Neolithic culture centered in upper Mesopotamia and the Levant, dating to c. 10,800 – c. 8,500 years ago, that is, 8800–6500 BC. Like the earlier PPNA people, the PPNB culture developed from the *Mesolithic Natufian culture. However, it shows a northerly origin, possibly indicating an influx from northeastern Anatolia.
*Mesolithic relating to or denoting the middle part of the Stone Age, between the Paleolithic and Neolithic.
The majority of the Eastern Mediterranean conifer-sclerophyllous-broadleaf forests, also known as the Eastern Mediterranean conifer-broadleaf forests, is an ecoregion in the eastern Mediterranean Basin. It covers portions of Turkey, Syria, Lebanon, Israel, Palestinian territories, Jordan, and Saudi Arabia if Canaan is covered by the Eastern Mediterranean conifer–scleropossibly indicating an influx from northeastern Anatolia.
Chalcolithic (4500–3500)
The first wave of migration, called *Ghassulian culture, entered Canaan approximately 4500 BC.
*Ghassulian refers to a culture and an archaeological stage dating to the Middle and Late Chalcolithic Period in the Southern Levant (c. 4400 – c. 3500 BC).

Rami Arav argues that the site of Rogem Hiri in the Golan was a particular type of Chalcolithic Age sanctuary, explicitly built for ritual excarnation—that is, exposing the dead bodies to vultures to divest them of their flesh.

This is the start of the Chalcolithic in Canaan. The Ghassulians original homeland was generally where the south Caucasus and the northwest Zagros Mountains meet. They brought an already complete craft tradition of metal work from their unknown homeland. They were expert coppersmiths; their work was the most advanced metal technology in the ancient world. Their work is similar to artifacts from the later *Maykop culture, leading some scholars to believe they represent two branches of an original metalworking tradition.
*Maykop ─ The Maykop culture (Russian: майкоп, mai. kɔp, scientific transliteration: Majkop,), c. 3700 BC–3000 BC, was a primary Bronze Age archaeological culture in the western Caucasus region.
It extends along the area from the Taman Peninsula at the Kerch Strait to near the modern border of Dagestan and southwards to the Kura River. The culture takes its name from a royal burial, the Maykop kurgan in the Kuban River valley.

Early Bronze Age (3500–2000)

Violin-shaped female *Cycladic figurines
Cycladic culture (also known as Cycladic civilization or, chronologically, as Cycladic chronology) was a *Bronze Age culture (c. 3200–c. 1050 BC) found throughout the islands of the Cyclades in the Aegean Sea. In chronological terms, it is a relative dating system for artifacts that broadly complement Helladic chronology (mainland Greece) and Minoan chronology (Crete) during the same period.
*Bronze Age ─ The Bronze Age is a historical period, approximately 3300 BCE to 1200 BCE, characterized by the use of bronze, in some areas *proto-writing, and other early features of urban civilization. The Bronze Age is the second principal period of the three-age Stone-Bronze-Iron system, as proposed in 1836 by Christian Jürgensen Thomsen, for classifying and studying ancient societies and history.
The rise of states or kingdoms marked the Bronze Age—large-scale societies joined under a central government by a powerful ruler. Bronze Age states interacted with each other through trade, warfare, migration, and the spread of ideas. Major Bronze Age kingdoms included Sumer and Babylonia in Mesopotamia and Athens in Ancient Greece.
*Proto-writing consists of visible marks communicating limited information. Such systems emerged from earlier traditions of symbol systems in the early Neolithic, as early as the 7th millennium B.C. in China. They used ideographic or early mnemonic symbols or both to represent a limited number of concepts, in contrast to accurate writing systems, which record the writer's language.