Amorites, the second term, is another third-millennium appellation and was
originally used for people who, from a Mesopotamian perspective, came from the
‘West’; the term also stood for one of the cardinal points. The same meaning is
sporadically attested in Old Babylonian texts from Lower Mesopotamia, but another
secondary meaning occurs there as well: Amorites had been an important constituent
of the Ur III army and were the founders of subsequent dynasties, so that the term
acquired distinct martial connotations and came to denote the political and military
elite, and the rural component of the population that supplied the greater part of the
armed forces in general (Weeks 1985 ). The term in this meaning does not occur
frequently either, and instead one encounters specific ethnic labels to designate these
groups: Amnanum and Yahrurum, for example, were the tribal groups that constituted
the core of the Babylonian army. Amorite was, furthermore, the name of a Semitic
language entirely different from Akkadian, and members of the political and military
elite in the Old Babylonian period habitually bore names in this language. This choice
was governed by tradition and prestige and is therefore no valid pointer to their
spoken language, and one observes furthermore that the Amorite onomasticon was
reserved for males only.
The particular meaning established for the second term allows us to see in ‘Akkadians
and Amorites’ a description of the population of the Babylonian state in two parts:
the Akkadian-speaking, urban population on the one hand, and the rural population
that provided military service on the other; it is unlikely that the pairing should also
imply a distinction in speech. This passage was presumably included in the redress
decree as it was first issued by Hammurabi, when it conceivably already had a
traditional ring, and was maintained in the edicts of the later Babylonian kings, even
when it eventually lost its accuracy with regard to the social constitution of their
state. This demographical makeover, which entailed the disappearance of the Amorites
and the emergence of a society that is described as comprising ‘Kassites and Akkadians’
in a royal inscription of the early Middle Babylonian period,^4 was the outcome of
migrations that seem to have begun under Hammurabi.
The main thrust in population movements at that time led from the Zagros
Mountains into the Mesopotamian lowlands. The sources from the time of the Upper
Mesopotamian kingdom of Samsi-Addu show vividly how this migration was initially
triggered by inter-Zagros conflicts, but then inadvertently escalated as a result of
military intervention of the Mesopotamian kingdoms (Eidem and Læssøe 2001 ). The
causes underlying these conflicts are not articulated in the texts, but it may be that
ecological deterioration led to inter-state competition over scarce resources, as well
as mass departures in search of new livelihoods; that the environmental factor should
be considered here is apparent when the widespread de-urbanization throughout the
Iranian highlands at the end of the Middle Bronze Age is taken into account (Lamberg-
Karlovski 1985 : 68 f.). The defeat of buffer states at or near the Zagros foothills –
such as the kingdom Qabra ̄ at the time of Samsi-Addu and the kingdom of Eshnunna
by Hammurabi – opened the door to a surge in ethnic displacement into the lowlands,
which the military campaigns against Zagros population groups that are recorded for
Hammurabi’s later years could not halt; on the contrary, these operations led to the
deportation of large numbers of prisoners of war who were settled in the Babylonian
countryside (Charpin 1992 ).
— Society and economy in the later Old Babylonian period —