10 Facts About Canaanites

These "proto-Canaanites" were in regular contact with the other peoples to their south such as Egypt, and to the north Asia Minor and Mesopotamia (Sumer, Akkad, Assyria), a trend that continued through the Iron Age.

Around 1650 BC, Canaanites invaded the eastern Nile delta, where, known as the Hyksos, they became the dominant power.

References to Canaanites are found throughout the Amarna letters of Pharaoh Akhenaten c BC.

Canaanites were the inhabitants of ancient Canaan, a region that roughly corresponds to present-day Israel and the Palestinian Territories, western Jordan, southern and coastal Syria, Lebanon, and continued up to the southern border of Turkey.

Canaan and the Canaanites are mentioned some 160 times in the Hebrew Bible, mostly in the Torah and the books of Joshua and Judges.

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Canaanites appears during the narrative known as the curse of Ham, in which Canaan is cursed with perpetual slavery because his father Ham had "looked upon" the drunk and naked Noah.

Philistines, while an integral part of the Canaanite milieu, do not seem to have been ethnic Canaanites, and were listed in the Table of Nations as descendants of Mizraim.

The Canaanites were described as living "by the sea, and along by the side of the Jordan" and "around Jordan" (Book of Joshua 22:9).

Canaanites are said to have been one of seven regional ethnic divisions or "nations" driven out by the Israelites following the Exodus.

Name "Canaanites" is attested as the endonym of the people later known to the Ancient Greeks from c BC as Phoenicians, and following the emigration of Canaanite-speakers to Carthage, was used as a self-designation by the Punics (chanani) of North Africa during Late Antiquity.