Canaan in the Late Bronze Age was a shadow of what it had been centuries earlier: many cities were abandoned, others shrank in size, and the total settled population was probably not much more than a hundred thousand [REF].
The Canaanite city-state system broke down at the end of the Late Bronze period,[REF] and Canaanite culture was then gradually absorbed into that of the Philistines, Phoenicians and Israelites [REF].