Near East Kingdoms

Canaan / Kena'ani / Kinakhna

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The Levant in the period between about 10,000-3000 BC was the centre of the Neolithic Farmer revolution in the Near East. The process of domesticating wild crops took at least three millennia on its own, but this process also involved major changes in population density, social interactions, and outwards migration.

The Pre-Pottery Neolithic came in two major stages (PPNA and PPNB) which oversaw the transition from hunter-gatherer and wild crops to sedentary groups and domesticated crops. The subsequent Pottery Neolithic established the settlement structures which would later turn into city states, along with the crop farming and pastoralism which would support them.

In the mid-third millennium BC, city states began to appear in Syria as people benefited from interaction with Sumer and from improvements in irrigation. Within five hundred years, around 2000 BC, the same process was happening farther south and west, in the Levant, along the Mediterranean coast.

Semitic-speaking tribes occupied much of the area, creating a patchwork of city states of their own. Following the climate-induced social collapse of the thirteenth and twelfth centuries BC, the Phoenicians (more Canaanites) emerged to dominate parts of this region, eventually founding their own mighty seaborne trading empire.

Ancient Canaan was the region of the coastal Near East which stretched from the Sinai near today's border with Egypt, to the border with modern Syria (and partially across it too). The origins of the name 'Canaan' are obscure. It first appears in written records from the third millennium BC.

When Egypt conquered the Levant in 1453 BC it established its own province, which it called Kinakhna (Canaan). This would seem to be a slight distortion of the word which survives in Hebrew (itself the descendant of a Canaanite language), which is Kena'ani, or the Akkadian Kinahna, all non-Canaanite variations of the same word.

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(Information by Peter Kessler, with additional information by Sean Bambrough, Wayne McCleese, and from the John De Cleene Archive, from The Amarna Letters, William L Moran (1992), from the Illustrated Dictionary & Concordance of the Bible, Geoffrey Wigoder (Gen Ed, 1986), from Palestine, Joshua J Mark (available via the Ancient History Encyclopaedia website), from Easton's Bible Dictionary, Matthew George Easton (1897), from the NOVA/PBS documentary series, The Bible's Buried Secrets, first broadcast 18 November 2008, from the Encyclopaedia Britannica, from Melchizedek, King of Sodom: How Scribes Invented the Biblical Priest-King, Robert R Cargill (Oxford Scholarship Online, 2019), from Jewish War & Jewish Antiquities, Flavius Josephus, and from External Links: Time Maps, and The Land of Gerar, Y Aharoni (Israel Exploration Journal 6, No 1, 1956, pp 26-32, available via JSTOR), and Ancient History Encyclopaedia, and Encyclopaedia Britannica, and Shechem (Ancient Near East).)