FRIENDS OF ASOR WEBINARS
Amorites, Their Origins, and Their Legacy
Friends of ASOR present the next webinar in the 2023-2024 season on April 18, 2024, at 3:00 pm EDT, presented by Dr. Aaron Burke.
The Amorites, an ancient Near Eastern group, are infamous in the Bible, where they are remembered among Canaan’s inhabitants at the time of its conquest by Israel. Yet, in Near Eastern studies the Amorite’s origins are only poorly understood. As a collective identity, they are best known for their encounters with the military establishments of Akkad and Ur in the late third millennium, and their alleged role as pastoralists par excellence. However, the shaping of this collective identity must be set against the backdrop of both Akkadian imperial intervention and the declining environmental conditions of this period in the marginal zones of the Fertile Crescent. Tracing the migration of Amorite refugees from agropastoral communities into nearby regions, mercenarism and militarism are seen to play a crucial role in the acquisition of economic and political power by Amorites between 2100 and 1900 BC. Members of this group became founders of well-known Amorite dynasties from Bahrain in the Persian Gulf to the Egyptian Delta. In the wake of the emergence of these dynasties in the early second millennium, traditional means of legitimation served to consolidate their power. Driven by a shared interest in the legitimation of their control, they patronized long-distance trade, construction projects, religious orders, the arts, warfare, fortification building, and standardizations of law. The extensive nature of these efforts have led some to refer to this as “the age of Amorites,” and it may be argued that the material effects of this contributed to the construction of an Amorite koine. This lecture explores the origins of Amorite identity, why it spread, and why it was remembered in later Near Eastern traditions.
Aaron A. Burke received his Ph.D. in Near Eastern Archaeology from The University of Chicago. He is Professor of the Archaeology of Ancient Israel and the Levant, and the Kershaw Chair of the Ancient Eastern Mediterranean Studies in the Department of Near Eastern Languages and Cultures at The University of California, Los Angeles. He is also a member of UCLA’s Cotsen Institute of Archaeology, serving as its editor-in-chief since 2016.
Since 1994, he has excavated in Israel but also Egypt and Turkey, and travelled extensively throughout the Levant from Syria to Lebanon, Jordan, Cyprus, and in Greece, collaborating in field research at Jerusalem, Jaffa, and Tel Dan. He directs The Jaffa Cultural Heritage Project since 2007 and has co-edited three volumes resulting from research in Jaffa, Israel. Expanding upon this research, in 2017 he inaugurated Turning Points, an initiative aimed at exploring the context out of which ancient Israel emerged during the Early Iron Age in the southern Levant, ca. 1200–1000 B.C.
Burke’s research focuses on the social history of the Levant and Eastern Mediterranean during the Bronze and Iron Ages with a particular interest in identity transformations surrounding warfare, forced migration, and long-distance exchange. His first monograph, “Walled Up to Heaven”: The Evolution of Middle Bronze Age Fortification Strategies in the Levant, addressed warfare during a period of Amorite political hegemony. He is also author of The Amorites and the Bronze Age Near East (CUP 2021), which seeks to reconstruct a social history of the Amorites from 2500 to 1500 BC. Since 2021, he is also the series editor for Elements in the Archaeology of Ancient Israel (CUP).
This webinar will be recorded and all paid registrants will be sent a link to view the recording.
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ASOR Sustaining Members: $0 | ASOR Members: $6.50 | Public: $13
Season Pass: ASOR Sustaining Members: $0 | ASOR Members: $75 | Public: $155
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All proceeds from this webinar are used to fund scholarships for members as well as increasing ASOR’s online resources, which are free to the public.
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