AMORITE LANGUAGE

one of the most ancient of the archaic Semitic languages, distributed in an area that is now northern Syria. Amorite is known almost exclusively from glosses and names, and the only known grammar is the grammar of names. Despite the unknown linguistic characteristics, Amorite is dated from the known chronology of proper names of the period in the last century of the 3rd millennium BC. It was probably the language of the seminomads of the West Semitic area. As a Northern Central Semitic language, Amorite is affiliated with the Afro-Asiatic (formerly Hamito-Semitic) family of languages.