Canaanite is a term the atlas uses with the caution its own sources apply. It appears in Egyptian and Mesopotamian records and in the Hebrew Bible as a designation for the peoples of the Levantine coast and interior in the second millennium BCE, but no inhabitant is known to have called their religion Canaanite, and the cities involved, Ugarit, Byblos, Tyre, Sidon, Hazor and others, were politically separate and frequently at odds.
The material record shows an urban society of walled city states under Egyptian oversight through much of the Late Bronze Age, trading across the eastern Mediterranean, with temples inside the towns and open air cult sites beyond them. Alphabetic writing developed in this milieu, first in the cuneiform alphabet used at Ugarit and then in the linear script that became the Phoenician alphabet and, through it, the Greek and Latin ones.
Michael Coogan and Mark Smith's collection presents the surviving narratives to general readers and is frank about the distance between them and the Hebrew Bible's account. The biblical picture of Canaanite religion, with its child sacrifice and its fertility rites, is hostile polemic composed centuries later, and the archaeological and textual evidence for its specific charges is contested rather than settled. The atlas reports the charge, names its source, and does not adopt it.