Amorites
The Amorites established several prominent city-states in various locations, such as Isin, Kurda, Larsa, Mari, and Ebla, and later founded Babylon and the Old Babylonian Empire.
They also founded the Fourteenth Dynasty of Egypt during the fragmented era of the Second Intermediate Period in the Nile Delta, which was characterized by rulers bearing Amorite names such as Yakbim Sekhaenre, and were likely part of the later Hyksos.
[4] It is thought that terms like mar.tu were used to represent what we now call the Amorites: In two Sumerian literary compositions written long afterward in the Old Babylonian period, Enmerkar and the Lord of Aratta and Lugalbanda and the Anzu Bird, the Early Dynastic ruler of Uruk Enmerkar (listed in the Sumerian King List) mentions "the land of the mar.tu".
[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.
[8] For the Akkadian emperors 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.
[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.
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.
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.
[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.
In the north, the Amorite ruler of Ekallatum, Shamshi-Adad I conquered Assur and formed the large, though short-lived Kingdom of Upper Mesopotamia.
[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.
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.
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 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).
[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 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.
[40] 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.
