It was also the longer form which was preserved among the Israelites as
well as among the Phoenicians, the original inhabitants of the
sea-coast. Coins of Laodicea, on the Orontes, bear the inscription,
"Laodicea a metropolis in Canaan," and St. Augustine states that in his
time the Carthaginian peasantry of Northern Africa, if questioned as to
their descent, still answered that they were "Canaanites." (_Exp. Epist.
ad Rom._ 13.)

In course of time the geographical signification of the name came to be
widely extended beyond its original limits. Just as Philistia, the
district of the Philistines, became the comprehensive Palestine, so
Canaan, the land of the Canaanites of the coast and the valley, came to
denote the whole of the country between the Jordan and the sea. It is
already used in this sense in the cuneiform correspondence of Tel
el-Amarna. Already in the century before the Exodus Kinakhna or Canaan
represented pretty nearly all that we now mean by "Palestine." It was in
fact the country to the south of "the land of the Amorites," and "the
land of the Amorites" lay immediately to the north of the Waters of
Merom.

In the geographical table in the tenth chapter of Genesis Canaan is
stated to be the son of Ham and the brother of Mizraim or Egypt. The
statement indicates the age to which the account must go back. There was
only one period of history in which Canaan could be geographically
described as a brother of Egypt, and that was the period of the
eighteenth and nineteenth dynasties, when for a while it was a province
of the Pharaohs. At no other time was it closely connected with the sons
of Ham. At an earlier epoch its relations had been with Babylonia rather
than with the valley of the Nile, and with the fall of the nineteenth
dynasty the Asiatic empire of Egypt came finally to an end.