History

The Canaanite dialect is first identifiable among the 14th century bc Amarna letters, mostly written between rulers in Egypt and their vassal states in Syria—Palestine. Some letters were from Babylon and the Hittite empire in Anatolia. They were written in the cuneiform Akkadian script—the lingua franca at the time—but contain a number of glosses, or explanations of unfamiliar terms. Because the language was Canaanite but the script was Akkadian, it only would have been understood by those scribes trained to read and write it. However, Akkadian logograms could have multiple semantic values. A common example of one of these glosses comes from Amarna Letter 287:27: ŠU: zu-ru-uh. ŠU is the Akkadian logogram for “arm.” It is separated by two oblique wedges from zu-ru-uh, the Canaanite gloss written in Akkadian syllables. It is related to the Hebrew word for arm, zeroa’.

Proto-Canaanite is a regional manifestation of Proto-Sinaitic, which was a writing system found in the Sinai Peninsula that bridged the gap between the hieroglyphs of Egypt and the alphabet of Phoenicia. Fifteen Proto-Canaanite signs have been identified from inscriptions dating to around the 14th/13th centuries bc. The language is understood to be West Semitic, but decipherment is not far advanced and the boundaries of the language have not been delineated. Some inscribed arrowheads and other inscriptions from Phoenicia and Canaan link Proto-Canaanite to the 22-character Phoenician alphabet, which developed around the 12th century bc.