Amorite (Hebrew ’^emōrî, Egyptian Amar, Akkadian Tidnum or Amurrūm (corresponding to Sumerian MAR.TU or Martu) refers to a Semitic people 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).

From inscriptions and tablets

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In early Babylonian inscriptions, all western lands, including Syria and 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 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.

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