Canaan

The Akkadian name for the region, Kinaḫḫi (also Kinaḫni), in the diplomatic language of the Late Bronze Age. The Amarna letters use it for the Levantine territory under Egyptian control: a king of Babylon complains that his merchants were robbed “in Kinaḫḫi,” and the local rulers and the pharaoh refer to the land and its kings under this name. It is the clearest ancient attestation of Canaan as a defined territory rather than a people, the administrative Levant of the fourteenth century BCE.

Kinaḫḫi carries the page’s most tantalizing clue to the name’s meaning. The same word, kinaḫḫu, appears in the Akkadian of Nuzi as a term for reddish-purple wool, the color of the murex dye, and many scholars connect the two, so that Kinaḫḫi would be “the land of purple.” If they are right, then the Akkadian name and the Greek Phoinikē that replaced it both describe the same coast by the same precious commodity, and the most ordinary diplomatic word for Canaan secretly anticipates, in another language, the dye-name by which the world would come to know the Phoenicians.

The West Semitic form of the name in the alphabetic cuneiform of Ugarit, Knʿn, attested as the gentilic knʿny, “a Canaanite.” The most-discussed instance is administrative: a text that distinguishes a knʿny, a Canaanite, from the people of Ugarit, which has fueled a long debate over whether Ugarit itself counted as part of Canaan or saw Canaan as a neighboring land to its south. Either way, the term is genuine Bronze Age West Semitic, the name in the mouths of the Levantine peoples themselves.

Knʿn is the oldest form of the name in a Canaanite language, the region’s own kin naming it (or naming the land next door) in the same era the Egyptians and Babylonians were writing of Kinaḫḫi. It is the reserved Bronze Age anchor of this page: the closest the project’s languages come to an endonym for Canaan, the Canaanite word for Canaanite, set down in the world’s first alphabet on the Syrian coast a little before that whole world collapsed around 1200 BCE.

The Hebrew name for the land, Kĕnaʿan, the Promised Land of the patriarchal and conquest narratives, the country promised to Abraham and entered by Israel under Joshua. Genesis personifies it as Canaan, son of Ham and ancestor of the peoples of the land, the Canaanites, Jebusites, Amorites, and the rest; the same word names the land, its eponymous ancestor, and, in a derived sense, “merchant,” after the Canaanite traders. It is among the most frequently named places in the Hebrew Bible.

Kĕnaʿan is the form through which the name reached the wider world, the headwater of the entire scriptural branch on this page. From the Hebrew, by way of the Septuagint’s Khanaan, descend the Latin Chanaan and the Syriac, Geʿez, and Arabic forms, so that the Bronze Age name of the Levant survived, where the Bronze Age itself did not, by becoming the name of the Holy Land in scripture. The Canaanites largely vanished into Israel and Phoenicia, but Kĕnaʿan, the name of the land they had held, outlived them all.

The Phoenician form, Kanaʿan, the name the coastal Canaanites kept for themselves and their land long after the inland territory had passed under other names. The Phoenicians, the seafaring branch of the Canaanites, never adopted a new collective name; in their own inscriptions they remained Canaanites, and the continuity ran to the very edge of their world, where Augustine reports that the Punic farmers of fifth-century North Africa, descendants of Phoenician Carthage, still called themselves Chanani.

On the Phoenicia page this same word stands as the Phoenicians’ self-designation; here it takes its place as one form among the wider family of the land of Canaan, the coastal dialect’s version of a name shared with the Ugaritic Knʿn, the Akkadian Kinaḫḫi, and the Hebrew Kĕnaʿan. It is the living end of the native tradition: while Hebrew kept Kĕnaʿan as a name for the past, a land to be conquered or remembered, the Phoenicians went on actually being Kanaʿan, Canaanites in the present tense, for a thousand years after the Bronze Age that the name belongs to.

The Greek name for the land, Khanaan, the indeclinable transliteration by which the Septuagint carried the Hebrew Kĕnaʿan into Greek, kept in the New Testament’s references to the conquest. Beside this biblical form, Greek antiquarian learning preserved a second, older name: Philo of Byblos, quoted by Eusebius, reports that Phoenicia had once been called Khna, after an eponymous ancestor, a recollection of the native Kanaʿan independent of the Bible.

Khanaan is the bridge by which the name passed from Hebrew scripture into the languages of Christendom, the ancestor of the Latin, Geʿez, and other biblical forms. Its existence beside Philo’s Khna gives Greek, like several other languages in this atlas, two names for one place reached by two roads: the scriptural Khanaan, transcribed from the Hebrew, and the learned Khna, remembered from the Phoenicians’ own account of themselves, the same land named once by its conquerors’ book and once by its inhabitants’ tradition.

The Syriac name for the land, Kĕnaʿan, taken directly from the Hebrew in the Peshitta Old Testament and keeping the West Semitic form with its ʿ (ʿayin) intact. As an Aramaic dialect of the same Levant that Canaan named, Syriac inherited the word by near-direct descent rather than through Greek, so that the Syriac Bible’s Kĕnaʿan stands closer to the Hebrew and the ancient Canaanite forms than the Greek-derived Khanaan and Chanaan do.

Kĕnaʿan in Syriac is the name come home to its own linguistic family. While the Greek, Latin, and Geʿez forms reached Canaan through translation and lost the guttural ʿ that Greek could not write, Syriac, a Semitic tongue of the region, kept the consonant and the shape of the original. It is a reminder that for the churches of the Aramaic Near East, Canaan was not a far scriptural abstraction but the very land they lived in, named in a word their own language had always had.

The Geʿez name for the land, Kanaʿan, carried into Ethiopic through the Greek of the Septuagint with which the Ethiopian church received the Old Testament. As a South Semitic language, Geʿez possesses the ʿayn of the original and so restores, in writing, the guttural that the Greek intermediary had dropped, even though the form came by the Greek road; the land of Canaan appears under this name throughout the Ethiopic scriptures of the patriarchs and the conquest.

Kanaʿan is the southernmost reach of the name, and a small linguistic homecoming. Geʿez took the word from the Greek Khanaan, yet being itself a Semitic tongue it wrote the name with the very consonant, the ʿayn, that the Semitic original had and the Greek lacked. The Bronze Age name of the Levant thus completes its longest journey, from the Ugaritic tablets of the Syrian coast to the liturgical language of the Ethiopian highlands, and arrives there looking, once more, like the Semitic word it had always been.

The Latin name for the land, Chanaan, taken through the Greek and fixed by Jerome’s Vulgate, with the ch- spelling that Latin used for the Greek khi. It is the form of the name in Western Christendom, the Chanaan of the Latin Bible and of the medieval geography and exegesis built upon it, the land of promise of the Old Testament read in Latin.

Chanaan carried the Bronze Age name into the languages of medieval and modern Europe, giving English Canaan and its cognates. The journey is a long one for so old a word: a name first written in cuneiform and the Ugaritic alphabet in the second millennium BCE, passed through Hebrew scripture and Greek translation, reached the West in Latin as the name of the Holy Land, and survives in every European Bible as Canaan. The land vanished as a political fact before the Iron Age was old; the name has not vanished yet.

The Arabic name for the land and its eponym, Kanʿān, kept in the Semitic shape with its ʿayn. Arabic received the name through the shared biblical and Qurʾānic tradition of the descendants of Noah, in which Kanʿān is a son of Ham; the historians and exegetes treat him as ancestor of the Canaanites, and the geographers know Arḍ Kanʿān, the land of Canaan, as the old name of Palestine and Syria. The form belongs to the same Semitic stock as the Hebrew and continues it directly.

Kanʿān is the Semitic branch of the name brought down to the medieval and modern Near East, and, like the Syriac, it keeps the guttural the Western languages dropped. Of the forms on this page, the Arabic and the Phoenician frame the whole history between them: the Phoenician Kanaʿan is the name as the Canaanites’ own descendants used it in antiquity, and the Arabic Kanʿān is the name as the later inhabitants of the same land have carried it, the one consonant-skeleton k-n-ʿ-n unbroken across three thousand years of the Levant.