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"Canaanites" or "Amorites"? A Study on Semitic toponyms of the second millenium BC in the Land of Canaan

Paper · 2016 · Pauli Ensio Juhani Rahkonen

Summary

Rahkonen asks what place names from the second millennium BC can reveal about who settled the Southern Levant and where their naming habits came from. He deliberately avoids assigning toponyms to specific ethnic or linguistic groups. Instead, he maps the geography of recurring Northwest Semitic name patterns and checks those maps against archaeological settlement data and written sources such as Egyptian lists, the Amarna letters and texts from Mari and Ugarit. Two patterns stand out. Names built as stem + -ōn cluster in Phoenicia and on the coast of modern Israel. Names of the form bêṯ + adjunct appear mainly in the hills of Galilee and Judah-Benjamin, and they have close parallels in Syro-Mesopotamia. Neither pattern occurs in the Hill Country of Ephraim. The -ōn map lines up well with Susan L. Cohen's (2002) reconstruction of early settlement phases. Taken together, the evidence suggests northern migration or linguistic influence during the early second millennium BC. The study also shows that onomastics and archaeology can usefully test each other's conclusions.

Key points

  • The -ōn ending comes from the Canaanite sound change *-ān > -ōn, which is placed after c.1300 BC. No toponyms keeping the older *-ān(u) form survive in the region, so the author infers that the shift affected every such name there.
  • The inland type bêṯ + adjunct matches the bīt- + adjunct names of the Old and Middle Babylonian North Syrian Amurru area. It is almost absent from the coast, so it could not have spread into the hills from the coastal plain.
  • In the MB II period, Galilee had two gateways for northern influence:
    • Acco–Kabri in the west, facing Lebanon;
    • Ḥaṣor–Laiš in the east, facing Syro-Mesopotamia, which is the likely route for the bêṯ type.
  • The coastal and inland zones also differ in other ways. The coast was agricultural and lay on the route Egypt–Ašqelōn–Acco–Tyre–Ugarit. The inland zone was more semi-pastoral and lay on the route Ḥeḇrōn–Shechem–Ḥaṣor.
  • The method rests on lexical and phonetic markers. For example, Moabite uses qīr for 'town' where Hebrew has ʿīr. Hebrew forms are given in a simplified ISO 259 transliteration.

Interesting ideas

  • I1. A choice between synonyms that is regular across a region can act as a dialect fingerprint, as with Moabite qīr versus ʿīr for 'town'; such signals are cheap to detect and fairly reliable.
  • I2. Two disciplines with complementary blind spots support each other: onomastics is good at identifying language but weak at dating, while archaeology is the reverse, so agreement between them counts as real evidence.
  • I3. A pattern's absence carries information: neither type occurs in Ephraim, and no pre-shift *-ān form survives anywhere, which supports the claim that the shift was complete.
  • I4. A transmission route can be ruled out when the supposed source lacks the pattern: the bêṯ type could not have come from the coast because it is practically absent there.
  • I5. The author keeps linguistic groups, which shaped the names, separate from ethnic groups, which shaped history, so the analysis does not depend on contested labels.

For Mova

How these ideas could serve Mova, our small open language model — its files, stages and tests:

  • I1 (tokens): The lemmatizer could keep a small table of variety-marking synonyms, such as British versus American spellings and lexemes, and record a detected-dialect feature that later stages can explain.
  • I2 (learn): When building silver data, prefer witness parsers with different failure modes, and give agreement between dissimilar witnesses more weight than agreement between near-clones.
  • I3 (learn): Evaluation should report categories where a construction is expected but never fires, using the gap as a negative control instead of looking only at the hits.
  • I4 (world): When reasoning about where an entity's attribute or a piece of knowledge came from, the world model can discard candidate sources that never held that attribute, and give that elimination as an explicit step in the explanation.
  • I5 (world): The ontology should keep "language or dialect of a text" separate from "group identity of an entity", so that one is never silently inferred from the other.

Our summary of the paper, in our own words — not its text. The work belongs to its authors; read it at the links above.

 Fields, topics and concepts

📚 Shelves 3The field of science this work belongs to (OpenAlex fields).Arts and Humanities · 17,450 worksReligious studies · 227 worksArcheology · 64 works

🧭 Topics 1Research subjects and languages the work is about.Semitic languages · 3,066 works

Cite

Cite as Pauli Ensio Juhani Rahkonen. 2016. "Canaanites" or "Amorites"? A Study on Semitic toponyms of the second millenium BC in the Land of Canaan. Studia Orientalia Electronica 4.

The paper itself, not this page. BibTeX from the library's record of the work.

@inproceedings{rahkonen2016canaanites,
  title = {{"Canaanites" or "Amorites"? A Study on Semitic toponyms of the second millenium BC in the Land of Canaan}},
  author = {Pauli Ensio Juhani Rahkonen},
  booktitle = {Studia Orientalia Electronica 4},
  year = {2016},
  url = {https://journal.fi/store/article/view/46542}
}

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