Near Eastern Historyerary sources for our period know nothing. Archaeological evi-
dence has been interpreted to indicate a recurring pattern of
such migrations, but this may be in part because the early ar-
chaeological literature assumed that every new pottery style
testified to the arrival of a new ethnic group.
Although the copious records of the late third and early
second millennia describe no massive and sudden migration of
a primitive nation, they do speak of gradual infiltrations by
nomadic or barbarian peoples. It was in this way that the
"Amorites" (amurru, lit. "westerners") arrived in Mesopotamia
from the twentieth to the seventeenth centuries. Although oc-
casionally the immigration of "westerners" from the Levant be-
came such a nuisance that an imperial king might set up a wall
to prevent their entrance, most of the time Amorite immigra-
tion was accepted as part of the natural order of things. After a
particular group of Amorites had attached itself to a city's pe-
riphery, its members would typically find menial employment
(often being hired by the city's king as soldiers) in their new
home. The more ambitious would learn Akkadian, rise in sta-
tus, and eventually one might succeed in making himself king
and establishing a dynasty. Thus, for example, we find that
Hammurabi's "westerner" dynasty in Babylon was Akkadian-
ized at least in its official language, but retained Amorite per-
sonal names.
A similar infiltration occurred with the westward and south-
ward drift of people from what cuneiform sources called "the
land of Hurri" (somewhere in southern Armenia or northeast-
ern Mesopotamia) 1 during the late third and early second mil-
i. R. T. O'Callaghan, Aram Nabaraim. A Contribution to the History
of Upper Mesopotamia in the Second Millennium B.C. (Rome: Pontificium Insti-
tutum Biblicum, 1948), 80, concluded that at least for part of the second
millennium, Hurri was one of the several synonyms (Hanigalbat and Na-
harin being others) for Mitanni. However, "the land of Hurri," seems to
exhibit a certain southward drift in the sources, and it may be that in the
late third millennium the land of Hurri was somewhat to the north of the
later Mitanni.
47