The Amorites appear in the Bible as one of the peoples who occupy the land before the arrival of Israel or even of their ancestors in Genesis. In Deuteronomy 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 from Bronze Age writing in the wider Near East. Unlike Canaan, which appears mainly in Late Bronze Age Egyptian texts and the Amarna letters with reference to some part of the Levant, the word “Amorite” comes from much earlier and far away, never applied to people from the southern Levant. As Akkadian amurrû(m) and Sumerian mar-tu, the Amorites are found in Mesopotamian texts from the third millennium as some sort of outsiders, eventually identified with land and people west of Sumer. In early historical work on the origins of Israel and their relationship to the biblical narrative in Genesis, the migration of Abraham's family from Mesopotamian Ur to north Syrian Harran and finally to Canaan was understood to belong to large movements at the end of the third millennium that brought down the last great kingdom of Sumer. Mesopotamia's Amorites could be linked to a transition found archaeologically in the southern Levant from the Early Bronze to the Middle Bronze Age (ca. 2000 b.c.e.), and these phenomena offered a historical starting point for examining ancient Israel.