There are also sparse mentions about Amorites (often as MAR-DUki) in tablets from the
East Semitic-speaking kingdom of
Ebla, dating from 2500 BC to the destruction of the city in
c. 2250 BC.[6] From the perspective of the Eblaites, the Amorites were a rural group living in the narrow basin of the middle and upper Euphrates in northern Syria.[7] The Eblaites used the term MAR.TU in an early time for a state and people east to Ebla (around
Emar and
Tuttul), which means the name Amurru for the west is later than the name for the state or the people.[8]
For the
Akkadian kings of central Mesopotamia, MAR.TU was one of the "Four Quarters" surrounding Akkad, along with
Subartu (north),
Sumer (south), and
Elam (east).[8]Naram-Sin of Akkad records in a royal inscription defeating a coalition of Sumerian cities and Amorites near
Jebel Bishri in northern Syria c. 2240 BC.[9] His successor,
Shar-Kali-Sharri, recorded in one of his year names "In the year in which Szarkaliszarri was victorious over Amurru in the Djebel Biszri".[10]
By the time of the last days of the
Third Dynasty of Ur, the immigrating Amorites had become such a force that kings such as
Shu-Sin were obliged to construct a 270-kilometre (170 mi) wall from the
Tigris to the
Euphrates to hold them off.[11][12] The Amorites are depicted in contemporary records as nomadic tribes under chiefs, who forced themselves into lands they needed to graze their herds. Some of the Akkadian literature of this era speaks disparagingly of the Amorites and implies that the Akkadian- and Sumerian-speakers of
Mesopotamia viewed their nomadic and primitive way of life with disgust and contempt. In the Sumerian myth "Marriage of Martu", written early in the
2nd millennium BC, a goddess considering marriage to the god of the Amorites is warned:
Now listen, their hands are destructive and their features are those of monkeys; (An Amorite) is one who eats what (the Moon-god)
Nanna forbids and does not show reverence. They never stop roaming about ..., they are an abomination to the gods’ dwellings. Their ideas are confused; they cause only disturbance. (The Amorite) is clothed in sack-leather ... , lives in a tent, exposed to wind and rain, and cannot properly recite prayers. He lives in the mountains and ignores the places of gods, digs up truffles in the foothills, does not know how to bend the knee (in prayer), and eats raw flesh. He has no house during his life, and when he dies he will not be carried to a burial-place. My girlfriend, why would you marry Martu?[13]
As the centralized structure of the Third Dynasty of Ur slowly collapsed, the city-states of the south such as Isin, Larsa and Eshnunna, began to reassert their former independence, and the areas in southern Mesopotamia with Amorites were no exception.[14] Elsewhere, the armies of
Elam were attacking and weakening the empire, making it vulnerable. Ur was eventually occupied by the Elamites. They remained until they were rejected by the Isin ruler
Ishbi-Erra, which marked the beginning of the Isin-Larsa period.[15]
2nd millennium BC
After the decline of Ur III, Amorite rulers gained power in a number of Mesopotamian city-states beginning in the Isin-Larsa period and peaking in the Old Babylonian period. In the north, the Amorite ruler of
Ekallatum,
Shamshi-Adad I conquered
Assur and formed the large, though short-lived Kingdom of Upper Mesoptamia.[17] In the south,
Babylon became the major power under the Amorite ruler
Sumu-la-El and his successors, including the notable
Hammurabi. Higher up the Euphrates, to the northwest, the Amorite kingdom of
Mari arose, later to be destroyed by Hammurabi. Babylon itself would later be sacked by the Hittites, with its empire assumed by the
Kassites. West of Mari,
Yamhad ruled from its capital Halab, today's Aleppo, until it was destroyed by the Hittites in 16th century BC. The city of
Ebla, under the control of Yamhad in this period, also had Amorite rulership.[18]
There is thought to have been an Amorite presence in
Egypt from the 19th century BC. The
Fourteenth Dynasty of Egypt, centred in the
Nile Delta, had rulers bearing Amorite names such as
Yakbim. Furthermore, increasing evidence suggests that the succeeding
Hyksos of Egypt were an amalgam of peoples from
Syria of which the Amorites were also part.[2] Based on temple architecture,
Manfred Bietak argues for strong parallels between the religious practices of the Hyksos at
Avaris with those of the area around
Byblos,
Ugarit,
Alalakh and
Tell Brak and defines the "spiritual home" of the Hyksos as "in northernmost Syria and northern Mesopotamia", areas typically associated with Amorites at the time.[3]
In the 16th century BC, the Amorite era ended in Mesopotamia with the decline and fall of Babylon and other Amorite-ruled cities. The
Kassites occupied Babylon and reconstituted it under the
Kassite dynasty under the name of
Karduniaš around 1595 BC. In far southern Mesopotamia, the native
First Sealand dynasty had reigned over the
Mesopotamian Marshes region until the Kassites brought the region under their control. In
northern Mesopotamia, the power vacuum left by the Amorites brought the rise of the
Mitanni (Ḫanigalbat) c. 1600 BC.
From the 15th century BC onward, the term Amurru is usually applied to the region extending north of Canaan as far as
Kadesh on the
Orontes River in northern Syria.[20]
After the mid-2nd millennium BC, Syrian Amorites came under the domination of first the
Hittites and, from the 14th century BC, the
Middle Assyrian Empire. They then appear to have been displaced or absorbed by other semi-nomadic
West Semitic-speaking peoples, known collectively as the
Ahlamu during the
Late Bronze Age collapse. The
Arameans rose to be the prominent group amongst the Ahlamu.[20] From c. 1200 BC onward, the Amorites disappeared from the pages of history, but the name reappeared in the
Hebrew Bible.[21]
The language was first attested in the 21st-20th centuries BC and was found to be closely related to the
Canaanite,
Aramaic and
Sam'alian languages.[22] In the 18th century BC at
Mari Amorite scribes wrote in an Eshnunna dialect of
east SemiticAkkadian language. Since the texts contain
northwest Semitic forms, words and constructions, the
Amorite language is thought to be a Northwest Semitic language. The main sources for the extremely limited extant knowledge of the Amorite language are the proper names and loanwords, not Akkadian in style, that are preserved in such texts.[23][15][24] Amorite proper names were found throughout Mesopotamia in the Old Babylonian period, as well as places as far afield as
Alalakh in Turkey and modern day Bahrain (
Dilmun).[25] They are also found in Egyptian records.[26]
Ugaritic is also a Northwest Semitic language and is possibly an Amorite dialect.[27]
Religion
A bilingual list of the names of ten Amorite deities alongside Akkadian counterparts from the
Old Babylonian period was translated in 2022. These deities are as follows:[28]: 118–119
Dagan, who is identified with
Enlil. Dagan was the supreme god in many cities in the Upper
Euphrates, especially at sites such as Mari,
Tuttul, and
Terqa. Babylonian texts refer to the chief god of the Amorites as
Amurru (Ilu Amurru, DMAR.TU), corresponding to their name for the ethnic group. They also identify his consort as the goddess
Asheratum.[29]
Kamiš, an otherwise poorly attested deity largely known from Akkadian and Amorite
theophoric names. He was significant at
Ebla, where a month was named after him. The bilingual identifies him with the god
Ea though other god lists identify him with
Nergal.
Aṯeratum, whose name is cognate with
Asherah and is identified with
Belet-ili.
Yaraḫum, the moon god, who is named
Yarikh at
Ugarit. He is identified with the Mesopotamian
Sin.
Rašapum, equated with
Nergal and also known from Ebla.
A god with an incompletely reconstructed name (possibly /ʔārum/) who is identified with
Išum.
Ḫalamu, identified with
Šubula, a deity in the netherworld god's circle.
Pidray, previously known only from the Late Bronze Age Ugaritic texts and later. In the bilingual list she is identified with
Nanaya.
Aštiulḫālti, who is identified with
Ištaran, the tutelary deity of the city of
Der.
This list is not thought to represent a full Amorite pantheon, as it does not include important members such as the sun and weather deities.[28]: 139
Biblical Amorites
The term Amorites is used in the
Bible to refer to certain highland mountaineers who inhabited the land of
Canaan, described in
Genesis as descendants of
Canaan, the son of
Ham (
Gen. 10:16). This aligns with Akkadian and Babylonian traditions that equated
Syro-Palestine with the "land of the Amorites".[30] They are described as a powerful people of great stature "like the height of the cedars" (
Amos 2:9) who had occupied the land east and west of the
Jordan. The height and strength mentioned in Amos 2:9 has led some Christian scholars, including Orville J. Nave, who wrote the
Nave's Topical Bible, to refer to the Amorites as "giants".[31]
In
Deuteronomy, the Amorite king,
Og, was described as the last "of the remnant of the
Rephaim" (
Deut 3:11). The terms Amorite and Canaanite seem to be used more or less interchangeably but sometimes, Amorite refers to a specific tribe living in Canaan[32]
The Biblical Amorites seem to have originally occupied the region stretching from the heights west of the
Dead Sea (
Gen. 14:7) to
Hebron (
Gen. 13:8; Deut. 3:8; 4:46–48), embracing "all
Gilead and all
Bashan" (
Deut. 3:10), with the
Jordan valley on the east of the river (
Deut. 4:49), the land of the "two kings of the Amorites",
Sihon and Og (
Deut. 31:4 and
Joshua 2:10; 9:10). Sihon and Og were independent kings whose people were displaced from their land in battle with the Israelites (
Numbers 21:21–35)—though in the case of the war led by Og/Bashan it appears none of them survived and the land became part of Israel (
Numbers 21:35). The Amorites seem to have been linked to the
Jerusalem region, and the
Jebusites may have been a subgroup of them (
Ezek. 16:3). The southern slopes of the mountains of
Judea are called the "mount of the Amorites" (
Deut. 1:7, 19, 20).
The
Book of Joshua speaks of the five kings of the Amorites were first defeated with great slaughter by
Joshua (
Josh. 10:5). Then, more Amorite kings were defeated at the waters of
Merom by Joshua (
Josh. 11:8). It is mentioned that in the days of
Samuel, there was peace between them and the Israelites (
1 Sam. 7:14). The
Gibeonites were said to be their descendants, being an offshoot of the Amorites who made a covenant with the Hebrews (
2 Samuel 21:2). When
Saul later broke that vow and killed some of the Gibeonites, God is said to have sent a famine to Israel (
2 Samuel 21:1).
In 2017, Philippe Bohstrom of Haaretz observed similarities between the Amorites and the Jews, since both historically existed as well-connected disaporic communities. He also believes that Abraham was among the Amorites who migrated to the Levant, around the same time that the Amorites conquered
Ur at 1750 BC, due to his north Syrian heritage and shepherding-based lifestyles. Nonetheless, the Biblical authors only applied the Amorite ethnonym to the pre-Israelite inhabitants of the high mountains. Reasons include the polemical need to associate them with the "barbaric raw meat eating" Amorites that the Sumerians imagined them as. The authors also wanted to portray these inhabitants as having an ancient history. [33]
Origin
There are a wide range of views regarding the Amorite homeland.[34] One extreme is the view that kur mar.tu/māt amurrim covered the whole area between the
Euphrates and the
Mediterranean Sea, the
Arabian Peninsula included. The most common view is that the "homeland" of the Amorites was a limited area in central Syria identified with the mountainous region of
Jebel Bishri.[35][36]
Genetics
Ancient DNA analysis on 28 human remains dating to the Middle and Late
Bronze Age from ancient
Alalakh, an Amorite city with a
Hurrian minority, found that the inhabitants of Alalakh were a mixture of
Copper age Levantines and Mesopotamians, and were genetically similar to contemporaneous Levantines.[37]
Racialism
The view that Amorites were fierce and tall nomads led to an anachronistic theory among some
racialist writers in the 19th century that they were a tribe of "
Aryan" warriors, who at one point dominated the Israelites. This belief, which originated with
Felix von Luschan, fit models of
Indo-European migrations posited during his time, but Luschan later abandoned that theory.[38]Houston Stewart Chamberlain claimed that
King David and
Jesus were both
Aryans of Amorite extraction. The argument was repeated by the Nazi ideologue
Alfred Rosenberg.[39]
^
abBietak, Manfred (2019). "The Spiritual Roots of the Hyksos Elite: An Analysis of Their Sacred Architecture, Part I". In Bietak, Manfred; Prell, Silvia (eds.). The Enigma of the Hyksos. Harrassowitz. pp. 47–67.
ISBN9783447113328.
^van Seters, John, "The Terms ‘Amorite’ and ‘Hittite’ in the Old Testament", Vetus Testamentum, vol. 22, no. 1, pp. 64–81, 1972
^Katz, Dina, "Ups and Downs in the Career of Enmerkar, King of Uruk", Fortune and Misfortune in the Ancient Near East: Proceedings of the 60th Rencontre Assyriologique Internationale Warsaw, 21–25 July 2014, edited by Olga Drewnowska and Malgorzata Sandowicz, University Park, USA: Penn State University Press, pp. 201-210, 2017
^Archi, Alfonso, "Mardu in the Ebla Texts", Orientalia, vol. 54, no. 1/2, pp. 7–13, 1985
^Giorgio Bucellati, "Ebla and the Amorites", Eblaitica3, pp. 83-104, 1992
^
abStreck, Michael P., Das amurritische Onomastikon der altbabylonischen Zeit. Band 1: Die Amurriter, die onomastische Forschung, Orthographie und Phonologie, Nominalmorphologie, Ugarit-Verlag, 2000, p. 26
^Westenholz, Joan Goodnick, "Chapter 6. Naram-Sin and the Lord of Apišal", Legends of the Kings of Akkade: The Texts, University Park, USA: Penn State University Press, pp. 173-188, 1997
^F. Thureau-Dangin, Recueil des tablettes chaldéennes, Paris, 1903
^Lieberman, Stephen J., "An Ur III Text from Drēhem Recording ‘Booty from the Land of Mardu.’", Journal of Cuneiform Studies, vol. 22, no. 3/4, pp. 53–62, 1968
^Buccellati, G., "The Amorites of the Ur III Period", Naples: Istituto Orientale di Napoli. Pubblicazioni del Semionario di Semitistica, Richerche 1, 1966
^Gary Beckman, "Foreigners in the Ancient Near East", Journal of the American Oriental Society, vol. 133, no. 2, pp. 203–16, 2013
^[1] Clemens Reichel, "Political Change and Cultural Continuity in Eshnunna from the Ur III to the Old Babylonian Period", Department of Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations, University of Chicago, 1996
^
abMichalowski, Piotr, "Chapter 5. The Amorites in Ur III Times", The Correspondence of the Kings of Ur: An Epistolary History of an Ancient Mesopotamian Kingdom, University Park, USA: Penn State University Press, pp. 82-121, 2011
ISBN978-1575061948
^Wygnańska, Zuzanna, "Burial in the Time of the Amorites. The Middle Bronze Age Burial Customs From a Mesopotamian Perspective", Ägypten Und Levante / Egypt and the Levant, vol. 29, pp. 381–422, 2019
^Matthiae, Paolo, "New Discoveries at Ebla: The Excavation of the Western Palace and the Royal Necropolis of the Amorite Period", The Biblical Archaeologist, vol. 47, no. 1, pp. 18–32, 1984
^
abLawson Younger, K., "The Late Bronze Age / Iron Age Transition and the Origins of the Arameans", Ugarit at Seventy-Five, edited by K. Lawson Younger Jr., University Park, USA: Penn State University Press, pp. 131-174, 2007
^John Van Seters, "The Terms ‘Amorite’ and ‘Hittite’ in the Old Testament", VT 22, pp. 68–71, 1972
^Gelb, I. J., "An Old Babylonian List of Amorites", Journal of the American Oriental Society, vol. 88, no. 1, pp. 39–46, 1968
^[2] Ignace J. Gelb, "Computer-aided Analysis of Amorite", Assyriological Studies 21, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980
^Knudsen, Ebbe Egede, "An Analysis of Amorite: A Review Article", Journal of Cuneiform Studies, vol. 34, no. 1/2, pp. 1–18, 1982
^Burke, Aaron (2013). "Introduction to the Levant During the Middle Bronze Age". In Steiner, Margreet L.; Killebrew, Ann E. (eds.). The Oxford Handbook of the Archaeology of the Levant: c. 8000-332 BCE. Oxford University Press.
ISBN978-0-19-166255-3.
^Paul-Alain Beaulieu, The God Amurru as Emblem of Ethnic and Cultural Identity in "Ethnicity in Ancient Mesopotamia" (W. van Soldt, R. Kalvelagen, and D. Katz, eds.) Papers Read at the 48th
Rencontre Assyriologique Internationale, Leiden, July 1–4, 2002 (PIHANS 102; Nederlands Instituut voor her Nabije Oosten, 2005) 31-46
^Alfred Haldar, Who Were the Amorites (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1971), p. 7
^Minna Lönnqvist, Markus Törmä, Kenneth Lönnqvist and Milton Nunez, Jebel Bishri in Focus: Remote sensing, archaeological surveying, mapping and GIS studies of Jebel Bishri in central Syria by the Finnish project SYGIS. BAR International Series 2230, Oxford: Archaeopress, 2011
ISBN9781407307923
^Zarins, Juris, "Early Pastoral Nomadism and the Settlement of Lower Mesopotamia", Bulletin of the American Schools of Oriental Research, no. 280, pp. 31–65, 1990
Burke, Aaron A., "Amorites and Canaanites: Memory, Tradition, and Legacy in Ancient Israel and Judah", The Ancient Israelite World. Routledge, pp. 523–536, 2022
ISBN9780367815691
George, Andrew, and Manfred Krebernik, "Two Remarkable Vocabularies: Amorite-Akkadian Bilinguals!", Revue d’assyriologie et d’archéologie orientale 116.1, pp. 113–166, 2022
Homsher, R. and Cradic, M., "The Amorite Problem: Resolving a Historical Dilemma", Levant 49, pp. 259–283, 2018
[4] Howard, J. Caleb, "Amorite Names through Time and Space", Journal of Semitic Studies, 2023
Streck, Michael P., Das amurritische Onomastikon der altbabylonischen Zeit. Band 1: Die Amurriter, die onomastische Forschung, Orthographie und Phonologie, Nominalmorphologie, Ugarit-Verlag, 2000
Torczyner, H. Tur-Sinai, "The Amorite and the Amurrû of the Inscriptions", The Jewish Quarterly Review, vol. 39, no. 3, pp. 249–258, 1949
Wasserman, Nathan, and Yigal Bloch, "The Amorites: A Political History of Mesopotamia in the Early Second Millennium BCE", The Amorites, Brill, 2023
ISBN978-90-04-54658-5