Amorites

About 2000 BC, some people living in southern Turkey and Syria were called the Amorites. Amorites means "westerners" in Sumerian, and that makes sense because the Amorites lived to the west of Sumer. They spoke a Semitic language, and lived partly in cities and partly as nomads. When the Indo-European Hittites invaded Turkey, probably the Amorites were not officially conquered, but they did come under the influence of the Hittites and learned a lot from them. Mostly, the Amorites learned how to ride horses and how to use a war chariot for fighting.

The Amorites seem to have used this knowledge to attack Egypt, about 1700 BC. At first they probably attacked the parts of Syria that were under Egyptian control. When the Amorites won there, they continued on south along the Mediterranean coast through Lebanon and Israel into Egypt itself, where they seem to have controlled the mouth of the Nile (the area around Memphis) for a while. The Egyptians called them the Hyksos (HICK-soss), which just means the foreigners, the strangers.

With the start of the New Kingdom in Egypt, the Hyksos or the Amorites were forced out, and the invaders went back to their own land in Syria and southern Turkey. We do not know very much about them. The Christian Bible mentions them, placing them around 1200 to 700 BC. They seem to have eventually been absorbed by the Assyrian Empire.

To find out more about the Amorites, check out these books from Amazon.com or from your library:

Find Out About Mesopotamia: What Life Was Like in Ancient Sumer, Babylon and Assyria, by Lorna Oakes (2004).

Archaeology of the Land of the Bible: 10,000-586 B.C.E., by Amihai Mazar (1992). It's only marginally about the Amorites, but there's not much out there.

Ancient Near Eastern History and Culture, by William H. Stiebing (2002). Expensive, and hard to read, but it's a good up to date account.

The Assyrians

Main West Asia history page