On Tuesday, an exhibition called "Inscriptions and Writings of Ancient Palestine" was unveiled at the headquarters of the League of Arab States in Cairo.
The exhibit features photos of Canaanite inscriptions from between the 19th and 7th centuries BCE.
The reasons given for the exhibit are almost completely political.
The exhibition is meant "to purify the history of Palestine and the general culture of myths and legends," meaning to exclude the idea that Jews have a history in the region.
The head of the scientific committee of the exhibition, Durgham Fares, said that the exhibition, which will be shown in various countries, "aims to strengthen international, Arab, and Islamic public opinion in support of the rights of the Palestinian people to freedom, independence, and the establishment of a Palestinian state with Jerusalem as its capital, by providing a neutral scientific reading of the history of Palestine."
Fares also described "the importance of archaeological inscriptions and writings in understanding the ancient history of Palestine, and in refuting the modern allegations of the Zionist movement and the occupation."
This is propaganda, not a sober description of Canaanite culture. (The claim that Palestinians are descended from Canaanites is also quite shaky. Some almost certainly were, but most prominent Palestinian families proudly trace their lineage to other parts of the world.)
No one contests the idea that the earliest known use of an alphabet was in the region of Canaan, although it appears to have originated in Egypt as a simplified version of hieroglyphics for Semitic languages.
Unlike the curators of this project, the Israel Museum has an entire apolitical exhibit that credits the creation of the alphabet to Canaanite miners who were working for Egyptians in the Sinai, and who converted the thousands of Egyptian pictograms into a simplified, limited set of consonants.
The Israelis don't hijack history, as they are often accused of. They look at archaeology objectively and if a find is important for Muslim or Christian or Canaanite history they publicize it as well as they do for Jewish history. There is a bias, certainly - everyone is more interested in their own ancestors - but they are not dishonest. In fact, some of the most important Muslim archaeological treasures were found - and preserved - by Israelis. .
As this exhibit shows, the only parties that explicitly use archaeology to erase the history of a people are the Palestinians and their allies.
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