Amorite History in Syria

Your question has two components, the first is whether the information in this textbook is accurate, the second is whether these claims support Mesopotamian societies as ancient Arab kingdoms. Before we talk about accuracy and translation of the textbook, we should define what we are investigating: social identity.

Amorites and Social Identity

Studying social identity can be a political challenge: a recent case study of ancient DNA at the site of Ashkelon, located on the Levantine Coast of the Mediterranean Sea, provided enough public interest to garner both Palestinian and Israeli claims of ownership. This example is not to say either side was right, but that nation-states often find reason to bring ancient history into modern politics. This premise will come back at the end.

Amorites (العموريون) are a modern construct as well as an ancient one. The term is mapped onto a defined group of people in antiquity, whose details depend on the era being examined. Those eras have various shades of details: Amorites are known through the Hebrew Bible, the state of Ugarit, and several hundreds of years of cuneiform documentation ranging from modern Syria to The Gulf, and each of those sources have different concerns. Scholars range from seeing Amorites as a singular identity that was shaped over time and space, to others seeing them as a larger umbrella term of several varying identities.

Accuracy of the Textbook

• The Amorites came from Saudi Arabia.

The textbook doesn’t quite say that, it says جاءَ العموريون من الحجاز وبادية الشام (“The Amorites came from the Hijaz and the Syrian desert”). This claim is true. One may be surprised that a single identity came from two different places, from the northwest and the south, but it is theorized that Amorites had migration patterns that may have included paths that now exist in the Saudi provinces of Tabuk, Madinah, Qasim, and the Eastern Province closest to the Gulf. This is explicitly different than Saudi Arabia, which is a state that holds sovereignty over those places now.

• The Akkadians, Babylonians & Assyrians were waves of ancient Arab tribes who created Arab kingdoms.

I do not see where “waves of ancient Arab tribes who created Arab kingdoms” comes from. In that same section mentioned above, it says that Ebla, Mari, Babylon, and Assur were Amorite kingdoms. Again, this is true. Around the 19th century BCE, many kingdoms were ruled by Amorite tribal leaders. They were not homogeneous and there was plenty of disagreement between these kingdoms (Babylon reportedly wiped Mari off the face of the map, whereas Assur was occupied by Samsi-Addu and his son for only a brief period of time).

• The Arameans came from the Arabian peninsula in the 2nd millennium BC, and its script development

This claim is not quite accurate. We are not quite sure about where Aramean tribes may be originated, but it is likely to have been around the Levantine region, west of the Euphrates river, as opposed to the Arabian peninsula. The image associated with the claim comes from the 2nd century CE, from the city of Palmyra. Technically Aramaic developed in the late second half of the 2nd millennium BCE, hundreds of years outside of this discussion about Amorites. There are many theories as to why it became popular over cuneiform writing: some say it was easier due to there being fewer signs to learn as this textbook suggests. Others suggest it had more to do with cuneiform, namely Akkadian’s use of the script, was related to imperial domination.

Ancient Arab Kingdoms

The word that the textbook uses is الحضارة (civilization), rather than kingdom (ملكية) as seen on the first page. The term civilization does not necessarily hold much weight in scholarship anymore, but it is still often used; no problems here. As for whether these societies are Arab, this is where we must return to the start: just as we asked what it means to be Amorite, what does it mean to be Arab?

I say that this is a fast and loose way of defining these cultural groups and societies that currently exist in states that are defined as Arab. The description is vague and can suggest more than what can be claimed. But that is a modern assertion, not an ancient one. As for this being a 5th grade textbook, my own textbooks growing up in the US had similar nationalistic claims. These concepts are very complex and the information provided does not appear offensive or predatory.

ETA: Arabic isn't my strong suit, but I see now where it says أهم الممالك والدول العربية القديمة, so the textbook does explicitly use the word kingdom. The book is inconsistent in this way. Regardless, it's hard to say much more than what's stated above, given these are only three pages and it appears we're missing several.

Select Bibliography

• Michal Feldman et al. (2019), "Ancient DNA sheds light on the genetic origins of early Iron Age Philistines" in Science Advances 5/7 (https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.aax0061)

• Marc van de Mieroop (2022), Before and After Babel: Writing as Resistance in Ancient Near Eastern Empires.

• Nathan Wasserman and Yigal Block (2023), The Amorites: A Political History of Mesopotamia in the Early Second Millennium BCE.

• Aaron Burke (2020), The Amorites and the Bronze Age Near East

• Mary Buck (2020), The Amorite Dynasty of Ugarit: Historical Implications of Linguistic and Archaeological Parallels

• Piotr Steinkeller and Steffen Laursen (2017), Babylonia, the Gulf Region, and the Indus: Archaeological and Textual Evidence for Contact in the Third and Early Second Millennium B.C.

• Steffen Laursen and Faleh al-Otaibi (2022), "From Dilmun to Wādī al‐Fāw: A forgotten desert corridor, c. 2000 BC" in Arabian Archaeology and Epigraphy (https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/aae.12221)