Canaan

Canaan is a historical term used in ancient Near Eastern and biblical literature to denote a region in the eastern Mediterranean in the southern Levant. In its broadest sense, Canaan encompassed the coastal plain and inland hills between the Mediterranean Sea and the Jordan River, roughly corresponding to parts of present-day Israel, the Palestinian territories, Lebanon, and western Syria. The term appears in Egyptian, Mesopotamian, and Hebrew sources and is used by archaeologists to describe a cultural and geographic zone in the Bronze Age.

During the Bronze Age (roughly 2100–1200 BCE), the region was organized as a mosaic of urban-center polities ruled by Canaanite civilizations. Coastal cities such as Sidon, Tyre, and Byblos developed powerful trade networks, while inland centers near Hazor, Megiddo, Gezer, and Jericho formed key regional hubs. The Canaanites spoke related Semitic languages and shared material culture and religious practices, and they traded with Egypt, Mesopotamia, and networks across the Aegean and Anatolia.

Following the Late Bronze Age collapse, new political configurations emerged, including the appearance of Israelite and Judahite polities in the hill country and various Philistine communities along the coast. Over the subsequent centuries, the region came under successive empires—the Neo-Assyrian, Neo-Babylonian, and Achaemenid Persian, then Hellenistic and Roman administrations—though the term Canaan remained in use in certain sources.

Today, Canaan is primarily a historical term. It denotes a Bronze Age geographic and cultural zone rather than a modern political entity, with modern borders not corresponding to ancient Canaan.