The Amorites appear in the Bible as one of the peoples who occupy the landbefore the arrival of Israel or even of their ancestors in Genesis. InDeuteronomy 3, Sihon king of Heshbon is an Amorite, and Abraham (Abram)lives among an Amorite community with Mamre in Genesis 14. Like the name“Canaan,” however, the Amorite category is well known fromBronze Age writing in the wider Near East. Unlike Canaan, which appearsmainly in Late Bronze Age Egyptian texts and the Amarna letters withreference to some part of the Levant, the word “Amorite” comesfrom much earlier and far away, never applied to people from the southernLevant. As Akkadian amurrû(m) andSumerian mar-tu, the Amorites are found in Mesopotamiantexts from the third millennium as some sort of outsiders, eventuallyidentified with land and people west of Sumer. In early historical work onthe origins of Israel and their relationship to the biblical narrative inGenesis, the migration of Abraham's family from Mesopotamian Ur to northSyrian Harran and finally to Canaan was understood to belong to largemovements at the end of the third millennium that brought down the lastgreat kingdom of Sumer. Mesopotamia's Amorites could be linked to atransition found archaeologically in the southern Levant from the EarlyBronze to the Middle Bronze Age (ca. 2000 b.c.e.),and these phenomena offered a historical starting point for examiningancient Israel.