Canaan

Canaan is an ancient term for the country roughly corresponding to what was later historically known as Palestine, Eretz Yisrael, or the Holy Land, and in modern political terms Israel, the West Bank, and the Gaza Strip (The area of the Gaza Strip would, in the biblical times, become the marjority of the territory of Palestine.) The Canaanites were the Semitic inhabitants of Canaan before the Jews/Israelites arrived. In linguistic terms, Canaanite refers to the common ancestor of closely related North-Eastern Afro-Asiatic languages such as Hebrew, and Ugaritic, and was the first language to use a Semitic alphabet, from which the others derived their scripts.