Canaan

Canaan was the ancient name for the region along the eastern Mediterranean between Egypt and Syria. Its borders varied by source: sometimes all of Palestine and Syria, sometimes only the land west of the Jordan. The name appears in cuneiform and Egyptian texts from about the 15th century BCE. In the 14th century BCE the local rulers of Canaanite cities wrote to the pharaoh in the Amarna letters.

The Canaanites developed early alphabetic scripts that led to the Phoenician, Greek and Latin alphabets. Their religion, known best from Ugarit, featured El, Baal and Asherah.

In the Hebrew Bible, Canaan is the land promised to Abraham's descendants. Numbers 13 says the spies sent by Moses saw giants there, the sons of Anak, and felt like grasshoppers beside them. Historians and archaeologists generally see Israel's emergence as a gradual process within Canaan in the late second millennium BCE rather than a single conquest.