The Amorites: Rethinking Approaches to Corporate Identity in Antiquity
April 2025 | Vol. 13.4
By Aaron A. Burke
The past twenty-five years have witnessed an extensive reappraisal of the means by which groups and individuals are identified among ancient textual and archaeological sources. Much has been done to throw off the shackles of twentieth century deployments of ethnic constructs, even while interest in such regimes persists in modern political discourse as mechanisms for social advancement. Yet, tensions persist in how to approach corporate, collective, or group identity in antiquity and how we can avoid what can be called the ethnicity trap.
Wall painting depicting the Aamu (from Syria) in the tomb of Khnumhotep at Beni Hasan presenting gifts from Khnumhotep tomb. From Histoire de l’art égyptien (1878) by Émile Prisse d’Avennes (1807-1879). Digitally enhanced by Rawpixel CC By SA 4.0.
Most scholars will concede that individuals embrace a multiplicity of identities with respect to the various groups to which they belong, whether real or fictive kin (e.g., family, clan, tribe), or socio-ideological (e.g., town, state, faction, religious). However, most of our approaches to identity fixate upon a binary constructed in modern scholarship. This binary is between perceptions of corporate identity that struggle to escape ethnicity as a construct, on the one hand, and ideological emphasis on the individual, on the other. This dichotomy is fundamentally the product of what Joseph Henrich has termed “WEIRD” societies, namely, western, educated, industrialized, rich, and democratic social contexts. Scholarly approaches in WEIRD societies often place a higher value on understanding the individual over and against collective identities, for which there are many alternatives to ethnicity to be found among examples in non-Western societies. The unfortunate result is that the persistence of ethnic constructs has led to the reduction of the archaeological study of identity to a search for a set of traits within the archaeological record, even as we are aware of the concerns of the so-called trait-list approach. While we may recognize that the binary between the individual and the group is simplistic and that it fails to represent the many non-Western ways of thinking about identity and the individual’s relationship to groups, how can we better address it?
Archaeologists are fundamentally concerned with both group and individual identities, and our efforts are centered on recognizing overlapping identities, such as kin, religious, political, economic, or some blend of these and other affiliations. We may not have ideal terms for our understandings of identities, such as is embodied in a term like “ethnicity,” that represent our exact understandings of collective identity in the past, and so we often fall back on the label “social identity” to describe them. Even so, we still usually perceive that the individual chooses their affiliation with a social identity, placing the individual at the center of decision making (i.e., emphasizing agency) because of our WEIRD predilections, often overlooking that individuals might define themselves by their relationship to a group (father, daughter, leader, member, etc.), rather than as the sum of their own choices (occupation, accomplishments, etc.). However, as the social psychologist Jonathan Haidt observes, members of non-WEIRD societies “are more likely to see relationships, contexts, groups and institutions,” rather than individuals and singular objects. And, if this is so, then our starting point for ancient societies in the Mediterranean and Near East is often misplaced.
I think Haidt is on to something that is also very applicable to our efforts, namely, that our WEIRD worldviews have misled our efforts to understand the role and function of collective identities in the ancient world, whether “Greeks,” “Phoenicians,” or, as in my own study, “Amorites.” It is likely for this reason that there have been recent reactions against the continued use of such labels. Unfortunately, many of our efforts to articulate these identities have often led to their reduction to discrete characteristics (“trait lists”), while missing that only some of these characteristics bore real significance with respect to a specific identity, notably those associated with culturally-shaped behaviors (e.g., dress, foodways, burial practices) where some are more conservative (showing less change through time) than others. But whether as ethnic labels applied by non-members of a group (etically) or as labels appropriated by groups as a reflex of their social identity (emically) — or the result of some degree of both processes, the point is not if these identities actually existed at all. Rather, the central questions are how such identities took shape, how they changed across space and time and for what reasons. Also, why were some identities arguably more conspicuous than others, enduring for such lengthy periods of time, to be remembered much later?
There are many metaphors one might use to attempt to explain the evolutionary arc of a social identity, from its genesis to its sunset. But any analogy requires elaboration such that it can provide only a limited understanding of how social identities emerged, functioned, and almost always eventually disappeared. Indeed, as I have alluded to earlier, it is likely that what is needed is a an even wider interdisciplinarity that is beyond our individual academic trainings, which despite our best efforts remain, as I have argued, siloed by our proclivities into one or another of our specialties, like archaeology, philology, or history. While we are usually provided some exposure to all of these fields — and often pay them lip service in our research — we tend to favor one or another of these approaches more than others such that we tend to identify as practitioners of but one (i.e., as archaeologist, linguist, epigrapher, art historian), fearing to be seen as stepping into the sacred precincts of other disciplines where we are not priests (i.e., experts). Recent acknowledgment of the difficulties facing those undertaking more synthetic approaches is to be found in the multi-authored works that are now common to many article-length studies. However, it should be noted that no such trend has affected the realm of book writing, wherein the vast majority remain single-authored works, often attempting “big picture” histories, and for good reason. It is difficult to come to sufficient consensus among two or more authors to produce synthetic narratives that offer reconstructions of historical social phenomena. But these can only be undertaken at the intersection of a variety of disciplines that allow us to access the information in which we are interested. These are not just the traditional archaeologies, philologies, and histories in which we were trained, but also anthropological and social theories, and also, as I referenced earlier, social psychology. These are among the many disciplines that have informed my own work on the Amorites, for example.
Map of Syria and Mesopotamia ca. 1764, showing Amorite kingdoms. Map by Attar-Aram Syria, CC By-SA 4.0.
With respect to a longitudinal historical study of the Amorites in the Near East, I have sought to examine what the historian Michael Mann calls the four sources of social power (or “networks of social interaction”): ideological, economic, military, and political. In his now three-volume work, Mann seeks to trace these “institutional means of attaining human goals” from earliest times through the modern era—from Phoenicians to the United States—in order to explain the rise and fall of various sociopolitical groups. While in many ways his approach might appear to be an excuse to revisit all of world history through this lens—a time-honored tradition in history writing—it is most useful to our efforts to uncover social histories, which are a product of interactions between households and members of groups long since forgotten.
Inscribed foundation nail of Yahdun-Lîm, king of Mari. © 2023 Musée du Louvre, Dist. GrandPalaisRmn / Raphaël Chipault.
Although historical in its perspective, Mann’s approach is also helpful for the study of the Amorites because of his recognition that the cultural institutions were the sources of social power in the ancient and modern worlds. These institutions, even if varied in their constituencies and their operations from their modern analogs, expose the corporate nature of these endeavors and the power that was afforded by collective action, whether in the construction of monuments, the conduct of war, or trade. This steers us away from our WEIRD predilections, which increasingly embrace a now ubiquitous and somewhat over-stated “bottom-up approach,” which usually seeks to emphasize the individual within our reconstructions. Unfortunately, we do so quite often without clarity about the goals of such a “household” level focus, despite the fact that it often reflects a modern emphasis on the individual as well as reactionary tendencies against past examinations of what we perceive as the traditional loci of power, namely, elites.
While there is nothing intrinsically wrong with an interest in the individual if it does not neglect the significance and impact of their participation in corporate groups, an institutional approach recognizes the value of seeking to understand how institutions—the palace (i.e., kingship and the court), temples (i.e., priesthoods), and communities of practice (e.g., merchants, the army, mercenary groups, agropastoralists)—shaped the construction of social identities within which individuals participated, with far-reaching sociocultural implications. Approaches that overemphasize the individual or the household are, by contrast, a clear byproduct of WEIRD cultures, where we are inclined to, in the words of Jonathan Haidt, “see a world full of separate objects [and separate individuals], rather than relationships.” Institutions, however, are valuable not simply for the robust material records that they provide, which can be intensively interrogated archaeologically (e.g., the assemblages of palaces, temples, trade colonies), but also because they can often be studied through textual analyses, amplifying our ability to test our hypotheses about the social importance of these institutions. Amorite communities of the Middle Bronze Age offer many institutions for study, from the royal court, to the army, the temple, and diverse communities of practice. Furthermore, in our analyses of these institutions, we are increasingly recognizing that traditional characterizations of power structures, like kingship, cannot be understood simply through the interpretive lens of the tyrannical power of a single individual, even oligarchies, but that we must account for a wider analysis of the networks and institutions that supported rule by these individuals.
Cylinder seal of Ana-Sin-Taklaku, dynasty of Zimri-Lim (1782 – 1759 BCE), from Mari. © 2022 Musée du Louvre, Dist. GrandPalaisRmn / Raphaël Chipault.
That Mann’s approach is historical also means that a diachronic component should be sought in the evolution of Amorite identities, and the implications here are profound as well. This means that, while commonalities are to be found among the practices of individuals who identified as Amorite across different periods and places, their temporal and regional contexts also mediated these expressions of participation within an Amorite collective identity, as similar processes occurred among other groups like the Greeks, for example, across the Mediterranean. In this effort, we must also acknowledge that while we can speak of unity within a single identity group, often reflected by the adoption of a single ascription (e.g., Amorite), diversity within such groups is also reflected in the names of discrete social constituencies like tribes and clans (Amnanum, Tidnum, Yahrurum, etc.), whose affiliations with Amorite identity were also malleable and elective.
Such an observation also has implications for our understandings of Amorite language, a contentious enterprise with debated boundaries, because of the potential for changes across space and time, which traditionally contribute to the creation of new dialects and languages. Hence, philologists can debate, for example, the identification of Late Bronze Age Ugaritic as an Amorite language. But that Amorite as a language family exists, seems now without doubt, as recently published texts confirm. Thus, a single linguistic tradition cannot be articulated as a primary or exclusive basis for identification with Amorite identity. Instead, we must seek to create complex understandings of identity that do not neglect the likelihood that participation within a greater social identity may have meant the subordination of individualistic identities, which we in the West are prone to overemphasize.
Aaron A. Burke is Professor of the Archaeology of Ancient Israel and the Levant at UCLA. He is the author of The Amorites and the Bronze Age Near East: The Making of a Regional Identity (Cambridge 2021).
Further Reading:
Burke, A. A. 2021 The Amorites and the Bronze Age Near East: The Making of a Regional Identity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
George, A., and Krebernik, M. 2022. “Two Remarkable Vocabularies: Amorite-Akkadian Bilinguals.” Revue d’Assyriologie et d’Archéologie orientale 116: 113–66.
Haidt, J. 2012. The Righteous Mind: Why Good People are Divided by Politics and Religion. 1st ed. New York: Pantheon Books.
Henrich, J., Heine, S. J., and Norenzayan, A. 2010. “The Weirdest People in the World?” Behavioral and Brain Sciences 33: 61–83.
Mann, M. 2012. The Sources of Social Power 1: A History of Power from the Beginning to A.D. 1760. 2nd ed. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
How to cite this article:
Burke, A. A. 2025. “The Amorites: Rethinking Approaches to Corporate Identity in Antiquity.” The Ancient Near East Today 13.4. Accessed at: https://anetoday.org/amorites-corporate-identity/.
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