Various Canaanite sites have been excavated by archaeologists, most notably the Canaanite town of Ugarit, which was rediscovered in 1928. Much of our modern knowledge about the Canaanites stems from excavation in this area.
In linguistic terms, Canaanite refers to the common ancestor of closely related semitic languages including Hebrew, and Ugaritic, and was the first language to use a semitic alphabet, from which the others derived their scripts; see Canaanite languages.
The name Canaan is of obscure origins but is extremely ancient; the first known references appear in the 3rd millennium bc, possibly from hurrian sources in the Mesopotamian city of Nuzi.
The biblical explanation is that it derives from Canaan, the son of Ham and the grandson of Noah, whose offspring correspond to the names of Canaanite tribes in Genesis 10.
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