History of Canaan-Phoenicia

https://www.worldhistory.org/canaan/

Canaan was the name of the place, not the name of any particular "people."  There were many many different peoples in the region, in different locales and times.  Some of them were the Phoenicians, inventors of the phonetic alphabet.  The Phoenicians started from coastal cities in the southeast Mediterranean in the Bronze age, originally as far south as Gaza, and established a maritime empire throughout the Mediterranean foreshadowing Greece and Rome.  They were great exporters of paper and purple dye and became very rich.  "Canaan" and "Phoenicia" are both names for purple, the latter being the Greek name for purple, though not all Canaanites were Phoenicians.  Originally extending to Gaza, their major city state became Tyre, in modern Lebanon.  The Phoenician civilization was destroyed by Rome in 64 BCE with great prejudice...salting the earth in Carthage which was their greatest African settlement.

After Herodotus called the region previously known as "Canaan" (as originally inscribed in early Bronze Age mesopotamian texts) "Palestine" (after the then Philistine cities on the coast, though there are other theories, such as the Canaanite god Pales) in his 5th century BCE texts, the newer name gradually replaced the old names.

https://www.worldhistory.org/palestine/