Who were the Amalekites, and where did they live?

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The Amalekites were a nomad people of the Negev and the Sinai desert, between the hill country of Judah and Egypt, and they are known from the Bible alone: no Egyptian or Assyrian text and no excavation has yet named them. The map's point for Amalek stands at Kadesh-barnea, about 145 km south-west of Jerusalem in a straight line, where Genesis puts “all the country of the Amalekites” and where the spies reported that “the Amalekites dwell in the land of the south”. Saul pursued them “from Havilah until thou comest to Shur, that is over against Egypt”, and in David's day they were “of old the inhabitants of the land, as thou goest to Shur”. Genesis makes Amalek a grandson of Esau by Eliphaz and his concubine Timna; Balaam calls him “the first of the nations”. Their war with Israel runs through the whole story. At Rephidim “then came Amalek, and fought with Israel”, falling on “all that were feeble behind thee”; the Lord swore “war with Amalek from generation to generation”. When Israel tried to enter the land against his word, Amalekites and Canaanites chased them to Hormah. Eglon of Moab and the Midianites of Gideon's day brought Amalekites with them. When Saul was king, Samuel sent him: “Now go and smite Amalek, and utterly destroy all that they have”; Saul spared Agag and the best of the flocks, lost the kingdom for it, and Samuel “hewed Agag in pieces before the LORD in Gilgal”. Amalekite raiders burned David's Ziklag and fled on camels; the man who claimed to have killed Saul was an Amalekite. The last of them, Chronicles says, were destroyed by Simeonites in Mount Seir in Hezekiah's reign. In Esther, Haman is “the Agagite”, a descendant of Agag in Jewish tradition, and the synagogue still reads “Remember what Amalek did” on the sabbath before Purim. Scholars note that Genesis already knows “the country of the Amalekites” in Abraham's day, generations before Amalek was born to Eliphaz; either the writer names the land by its later people or the Amalekites were older than that genealogy, and “the first of the nations” has been read as the oldest of them. Surveys of the Negev and Sinai show that herders of the Bronze and Iron Ages left little but stone circles and sherds, so a people of tents is unlikely to be found by digging; the “city of Amalek” that Saul reached has been sought at Tel Masos, the map's Hormah, but this is a guess. In later Jewish thought Amalek became the name of every enemy of Israel, and the command to blot him out has troubled readers since antiquity.