The indigenous people of the land of Canaan worshiped many gods but, chief among them, the goddess Astarte and her consort Baal (considered vegetative/fertility deities who then took on more impressive attributes earlier ascribed to Sumerian gods such as Enlil).
Women could and did serve as Priestesses, could own land, enter into contracts and initiate divorce.
By the second millennium BCE Byblos was the great exporter of cedar from Mount Lebannon and of papyrus (the name of the Bible comes from the Greek word Byblos for `Book, a reference to the city which supplied the surrounding nations, especially Egypt, with the papyrus to write on) and Tyre was a great industrial centre producing highly sought after purple garments made from the purple dye of Murex shells and the city of Sidon, also engaged in similar trade, was a great centre of learning. The Canaanites (Phoenicians) developed the first alphabetic writing system, mathematics, were renowned in the ancient world for their skill in ship building and navigating the seas and have also been cited as the early source or inspiration for the mythology of the Greek gods. The Canaanites sailed across the sea as far away as Spain and as far north as modern-day Cornwall, England, and their cities grew, owing to their prosperous trade, into places of splendour and wealth.