Bronze Age Canaanite Urusalim (c. 2000-1170 B.C.E.)

Your origin and your birth were in the land of the Canaanites;
your father was an Amorite, and your mother a Hittite.
Ezekiel 16:3

Jerusalem first emerges from the general prehistoric fog as a city among others in a system of Canaanite city-states in the Bronze Age Levant. A Bronze Age “city-state” consisted of an urban center and a rural hinterland. Social organization focused on a palace, its royal family, the scribes, charioteers, and other specialists needed to maintain control over the agro-pastoral population and protect it from competitors and bandits. Like other small players in this political and economic network, the city rises and falls due to a number of local and regional factors, among them the exploitation of Canaan by the larger regional states (“empires”), such as Egypt to the south and the Hurrians and later the Hittites to the north, and the social-economic tensions that arose from the institution of debt-slavery, which created a class of social outcasts, the hapiru. This system comes to an end when several things happen simultaneously: Egypt is weakened by foreign invasions (Lybians from the west and Sea Peoples from the northeast); the Hittite Empire collapses; and most Canaanite city-states are destroyed and/or abandoned due to social upheavals, invasions, and climate change. Unlike the coastal cities captured by the Sea Peoples, the hill-town Jerusalem is not destroyed by force but declines to the point of seeming to have been abandoned when, at the same time, many new villages appear in the northern hill country, the later heartland of “Israel.” One of the issues debated among archeologists and historians is the time of Jerusalem’s urban renaissance and its relative significance compared with other urban centers of Judah, the Shephelah, and with the Israelite capital Samaria.

Variants of the biblical term “Canaan” are widely attested also in pre- and extra-biblical sources (Hurrian, Akkadian) as a toponym for the coastal region of the Levant. The word is most likely derived from a type of murex snail that florished in the Eastern Mediterranean that was known as the source of a coveted purple dye. The dye continued to be produced, mainly in Tyre (hence “Tyrian purple”), until the early Middle Ages. In Iron-Age Assyrian records, the preferred term is “Hatti-land,” land of the Hittites. Babylonians referred to it as ever-nari (Aramaic avar nahara), i.e., the “land across the river” (i.e., beyond the Euphrates), a term also found in the Bible, for example in 1 K 5:4. Also used as a term for the entire region of Canaan is “land of the Amurru” (the biblical Amorites), referring to a group of originally nomadic people who dominated the area west of the Euphrates for most of the Early Bronze Age and whose cultural and mythological influence may still be discernible in Judahite traditions, such as the pre-YHWHistic name of the deity El Shaddai and the toponym Mount Moriah. Egyptian texts refer to Canaan as retenu or the land of the retenu. The western boundary of what the Romans were to call Syria-Palaestina was the Mediterranean coast, the eastern boundary the Euphrates River. To the north it could extend as far as the Orontes River, to the southwest it bordered on the Nile Delta and to the southeast on the northern Arabian Peninsula. These boundaries are not very precise and the exact meaning of imperial provinces called ever-nari etc. may have differed, just as biblical passages referring to Canaan or the Land of Israel differ in what they include in this geographic or administrative term. The region was not as populous as the urban centers of the Fertile Crescent or the Nile Delta where populations numbered in the millions, whereas the entire ancient Southern Levant, i.e., Palestine, barely numbered half a million people at the time of its greatest economic prowess in the 8th century BCE. The estimated population of 8th-century BCE Jerusalem was 7,500.(1) The people of Canaan spoke a variety of West-Semitic dialects (including Hebrew and Aramaic); the Hurrians of Mitanni who dominated the region in the Early to Middle Bronze Age spoke a non-Semitic language. In the Middle Bronze Age, when Amorites also controlled the Mesopotamian region, Akkadian (cuneiform) was the dominant diplomatic language. The later Iron Age Canaanite societies adopted and developed variants of the Punic or Phoenician alphabet that also spread to the Aegean Islands and the Greek mainland, indicating the increasing significance of trade and trade centers for the dissemination of the elements of an Eastern Mediterranean koine or shared culture.