Amorite

 

(ăm'ərīts) , a people of Canaan. There is evidence of them in Babylonia, where in the 19th cent. B.C. they established under their patronage the first dynasty at Babylon. The most powerful king of this dynasty, Hammurabi, put an end (18th cent. B.C.) to Amorite domination and issued a famous code of law, similar to Israelite codes. At the time of Joshua the Amorites were living both E and W of the Dead Sea. They were subdued and gradually absorbed by the Israelites.

Ancient Mesopotamia
Euphrates · Tigris
Cities / Empires
Sumer: Uruk · Ur · Eridu
Kish · Lagash · Nippur
Akkadian Empire: Akkad
Babylon · Isin · Susa
Assyria: Assur · Nineveh
Dur-Sharrukin · Nimrud
Babylonia · Chaldea
Elam · Amorites
Hurrians · Mitanni
Kassites · Urartu
Chronology
Kings of Sumer
Kings of Assyria
Kings of Babylon
Language
Aramaic
Sumerian · Akkadian
Elamite · Hurrian
Mythology
Enûma Elish
Gilgamesh · Marduk

Amorite (Hebrew ’^emōrî, Egyptian Amar, Akkadian Tidnum or Amurrūm (corresponding to Sumerian MAR.TU or Martu) refers to a Semitic people^[1] who occupied the country west of the Euphrates from the second half of the third millennium BC, and also the god they worshipped (see Amurru).

Origin

From the 21st century BC, a large-scale migration of tribal federations infiltrated Mesopotamia, Syria and Palestine, dominating the Fertile Crescent after the downfall of the Third Dynasty of Ur, from about the 20th to 17th centuries. In the earliest Mesopotamian sources, from about the 24th century BC, the Amorites are associated with the West, although their origin was probably Arabia, not Syria.^[2]

From inscriptions and tablets

In early Babylonian inscriptions, all western lands, including Syria - Canaan, were known as "the land of the Amorites", who twice conquered Babylonia (at the end of the 3rd, and the beginning of the 1st millennia.)

The old name is an ethnic term, evidently connected with the terms Amurru and Amar used by Assyria and Egypt respectively. In the Sumerian spelling MAR.TU, the name is at least as old as the first Babylonian dynasty, but from the 15th century BC onwards, its syllabic equivalent Amurru is applied primarily to the land extending north of Canaan as far as Kadesh on the Orontes.

Previously, Assyriologists had theorized that the Amorites were a nomadic people ruled by fierce tribal clansmen who apparently forced themselves into lands they needed to graze their herds. This is because some of the literature that dates to the Third Dynasty of Ur at the end of the 3rd millennium speaks of the Amorites disparagingly. Some documents seem to imply that the Akkadians viewed their nomadic way of life with disgust and contempt, for example:

The MAR.TU who know no grain.... The MART.TU who know no house nor town, the boors of the mountains.... The MAR.TU who digs up truffles... who does not bend his knees (to cultivate the land), who eats raw meat, who has no house during his lifetime, who is not buried after death...^[3]

They have prepared wheat and gú-nunuz (grain) as a confection, but an Amorite will eat it without even recognizing what it contains!^[4]

However, much new archaeological evidence has come to light, and Assyriologists generally agree now that the Amorites never engaged in a concerted invasion of the Ur III Dynasty^{[citation needed]}. Many Amorites lived peacefully within the kingdom in small enclaves. There is now evidence that Amorites had served in Ur III armies and made up Ur III labor groups under both the Akkad and Ur III dynasties long before their ascendence to power in any region occurred.

As the Ur III Dynasty slowly collapsed and centralization disintegrated, regions all over Ur III were beginning to reassert their former independence, and places where the Amorites resided were no exception. Elsewhere, armies of Elam were attacking and weakening the empire, making it even more vulnerable. Some Amorites aggressively took advantage of the failing empire to seize power for themselves. There was no Amorite invasion as such, but Amorites did ascend to power in many locations, especially during the reign of the last Ur III king, Ibbi-Sin. Leaders with Amorite names assumed power in various places including the Levant and southern Mesopotamia. The Elamites finally sacked Ur and ended their dynasty in ca. 20th century BC (dates highly uncertain). Some time later, the most powerful ruler in Mesopotamia (immediately preceding the rise of Hammurabi of Babylon) was Shamshi-Adad I, another Amorite.

Amorites seem to have worshipped the moon-god Sin and Amurru. Known Amorites (mostly those of Mari) wrote in a dialect of Akkadian found on tablets dating from 1800–1750 BC showing many northwest Semitic forms and constructions.

Presumably their original tongue was a northwest Semitic dialect (see Amorite language.) The main sources for our extremely limited knowledge about the language are proper names, not Akkadian in style, that are preserved in such texts. Many of these names are similar to later Biblical Hebrew names.

The wider use of the term Amurru by the Babylonians and Assyrians is complicated by the fact that it was also applied to a district in Babylonia, where the land of Canaan did not traditionally extend. Moreover, if the people of the first Babylonian dynasty (about 21st century BC) called themselves "Amorites," as Ranke seems to have shown, then obviously a common origin with them was recognized by the Babylonians at that early date.

Repercussions over Mesopotamia

The advent of Amorite tribes into the Mesopotamian context, brought about deep and lasting repercussions in its political, social and economic structure.

The division into kingdoms removed any trace of the Sumerian city-state. Men, land and cattle ceased to belong physically to the gods or to the temples and the king. The new monarchs, gave or let out for an indefinite period numerous parcels of royal or sacerdotal land, freed the inhabitants of several cities from taxes and forced labour, and seem to have encouraged a new society to emerge, a society of big farmers, free citizens and enterprising merchants which was to last throughout the ages. The priest assumed the service of the gods and cared for the welfare of his subjects, but the economic life of the country was no longer exclusively (or almost exclusively) in their hands.

It is important to say that generally speaking, the Mesopotamian civilization survived the arrival of Amorites as it had survived the Akkadian domination and the restless period that preceded the rise of the Third Dynasty of Ur.

The religious, ethical and artistic concepts current in Mesopotamia since proto-history, were not affected. The Amorites worshipped the Sumerian gods and the older Sumerian myths and epic tales were piously copied, translated or adapted with generally only minor alterations. As for the scarce artistic production of the period, there is practically nothing to distinguish it from that of the preceding the Third dynasty of Ur.

Amorites in Antisemitism

The view that Amorites were fierce nomads led to an idiosyncratic theory among some writers in the 19th Century that they were a tribe of "Germanic" warriors who at one point dominated the Israelites. This was because the evidence fitted then-current models of Indo-European migrations. This theory originated with Felix von Luschan, who later abandoned it. Luschan's speculation was taken up by antisemites, notably Houston Stewart Chamberlain, who claimed that King David and Jesus were both of Amorite extraction. This argument was repeated by the Nazi ideologist Alfred Rosenberg.^[5]

External links

• Jewish Encyclopedia

Notes

1. ^ Amorites
2. ^ Amorite Encyclopaedia Brittanica
3. ^ Chiera 1934: 58 and 112
4. ^ Chiera 1934: 3
5. ^ [1] Hans Jonas, New York Review of Books, 1981

References

• E. Chiera, Sumerian Epics and Myths, Chicago, 1934, Nos.58 and 112;
• E. Chiera, Sumerian Texts of Varied Contents, Chicago, 1934, No.3.;
• H. Frankfort, AAO, pp. 54-8;
• F.R. Fraus, FWH, I (1954);
• G. Roux, Ancient Iraq, London, 1980.

Donate to Wikimedia