a
short, collateral form of Kena'an or Kan'an The form Kan'an is favoured
by the Egyptian usage. Seti I. is said to have conquered the Shasu, or
Arabian nomads, from the fortress of Taru (Shur?) to "the Ka-n-'-na,"
and Rameses III. to have built a temple to the god Amen in "the
Ka-n-'-na." By this geographical name is probably meant all western
Syria and Palestine with Raphia--"the (first) city of the
Ka-n-'-na"--for the south-west boundary towards the desert.[2] In the
letters sent by governors and princes of Palestine to their Egyptian
overlord[3]--commonly known as the Tel-el-Amarna tablets--we find the
two forms Kinahhi and Kinahna, corresponding to Kena' and Kena'an
respectively, and standing, as Ed. Meyer has shown, for Syria in its
widest extent.

On the name "Canaan" Winckler remarks,[4] "There is at present no
prospect of an etymological explanation." From the fact that Egyptian
(though not Hebrew) scribes constantly prefix the article, we may
suppose that it originally meant "the country of the Canaanites," just
as the Hebrew phrase "the Lebanon" may originally have meant "the
highlands of the Libnites"; and we are thus permitted to group the term
"Canaan" with clan-names such as Achan, Akan, Jaakan, Anak (generally
with the article prefixed), Kain, Kenan. Nor are scholars more unanimous
with regard to the region where the terms "Canaanite" and "Canaan"
arose. It may be true that the term Kinahhi in the Amarna letters
corresponds to Syria and Palestine in their entirety. But this does not
prove that the terms "Canaanite" and "Canaan" arose in that region, for
they are presumably much older than the Amarna tablets. Let us refer at
this point to a document in Genesis which is perhaps hardly estimated at
its true value, the so-called Table of Peoples in Gen. x. Here we find
"Canaan" included among the four sons of Ham. If Cush in v. 6 really
means Ethiopia, and M-s-r-i-m Egypt, and Put the Libyans, and if Ham is
really a Hebraized form of the old Egyptian name for Egypt, Kam-t
(black),[5] the passage is puzzling in the extreme. But if, as has
recently been suggested,[6] Cush, M-s-r-i-m, and Put are in north
Arabia, and Ham is the short for Yarham or Yerahme'el (see i Chr. ii.
25-27, 42), a north Arabian name intimately associated with Caleb, all
becomes clear, and Canaan in particular is shown to be an Arabian name.
Now it is no mere hypothesis that beginning from about 4000 B.C.[7] a
wave of Semitic migration