By Sami Khiyami
The indigenous people of Syria, the Amorites and the Canaanites, have civilisations which go back more than 5,000 years. Some archaeologists think the Amorites, apparently tall and fair, were of Aryan extraction; but most think they were of Syrian origin, speaking one of the earliest known semitic dialects. Tablets found in Ebla and Mari, two important sites from the third millennium BCE, revealed a sophisticated, urbane and powerful indigenous empire, which dominated Syria and portions of lower Mesopotamia, Anatolia and Persia. Jonathan Tubb of the British Museum says: “We now see the Amorites moving into Mesopotamia and influencing events there (rather than the other way around)”.
The major Amorite cities, Ebla, Aram (Aleppo), Mari (their original capital) and Babylon, were distinguished by the introduction of the rule of law and replacement of the ancestral political system of city-states by kingdoms. Men, land and cattle ceased to belong physically to the gods or to the temples and the king. A new society of big farmers, free citizens and enterprising merchants emerged. Society was for the first time in history governed by the rule of law — the Hammurabi code introduced by the Amorite king of Babylon in 1750 BC.
The Canaanites (Phoenicians to the ancient Greeks), the other indigenous people of Syria, inhabited the southern and the coastal parts of Greater Syria. Canaan was a distinct political entity formed by a loose confederation of city-states during the third millennium BC. Their main cities were Damascus, the coastal cities of Akko (Acre), Sidon, Tyre, Arwad and Ugarit, all the Palestinian cities and other smaller cities extending to Kadesh in upper central Syria.
The Canaanites’ main achievement was to create the first letter-based alphabet (as opposed to syllable-based cuneiform). Later on, in the first millennium BCE, this alphabet was simplified by “re-born” Amorites: the Aramaeans. Aramaic (the language of Christ) became the spoken language of the Middle East, from Egypt to Persia, for almost one thousand years.
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