ashera of Samaria, which was not removed by the house of Jehu, is mentioned in 2 Kings xiii. 6; and Hos. viii. 5 seems to speak of calf-idols there, unless the prophet is already using the name of Samaria for the kingdom as a whole, as later writers often do. Ultimately, in the Greek period, the name of Samaria or Samaritis was applied to the whole tract of which it is the centre-the region between Judæa and Galilee, the country of the SAMARITANS (q.v.); and the New Testament uses Samaria in this sense. The city of Samaria was Hellenized by Alexander, who settled Macedonian colonists in it. It became a fortress and was twice taken by siege in the wars of the Diadochi (by Ptolemy I. in 312 and by Demetrius Poliorcetes about 296). Under the Ptolemies Samaria was the head of a separate province, and it continued to be a strong city till John Hyrcanus took and utterly destroyed it after a year's siege (c. 110 B.O.; see Jos., Ant., xiii. 10, 2 sq.). Taken from the Jews by Pompey, Samaria was one of the ruined cities which Gabinius ordered to be restored (Jos., Ant., xiv, 5, 3); then given by Augustus to Herod the Great, it was refounded by him on a splendid scale probably in 27 B.O., the autumn of which year, according to Schürer's calculations, is the probable epoch of the new city of Sebaste, as it was now called in honour of Augustus. Many remains of Herod's buildings, described by Josephus (Ant., xv. 8, 5; B. J., i. 21, 2), still remain; the most notable belong to a long colonnade just above the line of Herod's wall and those of the great temple of Caesar. The tombs of John the Baptist, Elisha, and Obadiah were visited at Samaria in the time of Jerome (see ÓBADIAH), and that of St John must have been shown there still earlier, for it was violated by Julian. The old crusading church, now a mosque, was built over the tomb of the Baptist, who is reverenced as a prophet by the Moslems. A view and plan of the church, with details, are given in the Survey of W. Pal. (Memoirs, vol. ii. p. 211 sq.), where also there is a plan of the city. (W. R. S.) SAMARITANS. This term, which primarily means "inhabitants of Samaritis or the region of Samaria," is specially used, as in the New Testament and in Josephus, as the name of a peculiar religious community which had its headquarters in the Samaritan country, and is still represented by a few families (about 150 souls) at Nábulus, the ancient Shechem. They regard themselves as Israelites, descendants of the ten tribes, and claim to possess the orthodox religion of Moses, accepting the Pentateuch and transmitting it in a text which for the most part has only microscopic variations from the Torah of the Jews. But they regard the Jewish temple and priesthood as schismatical, and declare that the true sanctuary of God's choice is not Zion but Mount Gerizim, overhanging Shechem (John iv. 20); here they had a temple which was destroyed by John Hyrcanus about 128 B.C. (Jos., Ant., xiii. 9, 1), and on the top of the mountain they still celebrate the passover. The sanctity of this site they prove from their Pentateuch, reading Gerizim for Ebal in Deut. xxvii. 4. With this change the chapter of Deuteronomy can be interpreted with a little straining as a command to select Gerizim as the legitimate sanctuary (comp. ver. 7); and accordingly in Exod. xx. and Deut. v. a commandment taken from Deut. xxvii. is inserted at the close of the decalogue. Thus on their reckoning the tenth commandment is the direction to build an altar and do sacrifice on Gerizim, from which of course it follows that not only the temple of Zion but the earlier temple of Shiloh and the priesthood of Eli were schismatical. Such at least is the express statement of the later Samaritans; the older Samaritans, as they had no sacred books except the Pentateuch, probably ignored the whole history between Joshua and the captivity, and so escaped a great many difficulties. The contention that the Pentateuch is a law given by Moses for a community worshipping on Mount Gerizim is of course glaringly unhistorical. By the (unnamed) sanctuary of God's choice the Deuteronomist certainly designed the temple of Zion; and the priestly law, which is throughout based on the practice of the priests of Jerusalem before the captivity, was reduced to form after the exile, and was first published by Ezra as the law of the rebuilt temple of Zion. The Samaritans must therefore have derived their Pentateuch from the Jews after Ezra's reforms, i.e., after 444 B.O. Before that time Samaritanism cannot have

existed in a form at all similar to that which we know;` but there must have been a community ready to accept the Pentateuch. In point of fact the district of Mount Ephraim was not entirely stripped of its old Hebrew population by the Assyrian captivity, and the worship of Jehovah went on at the old shrines of Northern Israel side by side, or even interfused, with the old heathenish rites of the new settlers whom the Assyrians brought to fill up the lands desolated by war. The account of the religious condition of the country given in 2 Kings xvii. 24 sq. dwells only on the partial adoption of Jehovah-worship by the foreigners who had come into the land, but by no means implies that the foreigners constituted the whole population. Josiah extended his reforms beyond the limits of Judæa proper to Bethel and other Samaritan cities (2 Kings xxiii. 19), and the narrative shows that at that date things were going on at the Northern sanctuaries much as they had done in the time of Amos and Hosea. To a considerable extent his efforts to make Jerusalem the sanctuary of Samaria as well as of Judæa must have been successful, for in Jer. xli. 5 we find fourscore men from Shechem, Shiloh, and Samaria making a pilgrimage to "the house of Jehovah," after the find that the people of this district came to Zerubcatastrophe of Zedekiah. And so it is not surprising to babel and Joshua after the restoration, claiming to be of the same religion with the Jews and asking to be associated with them in the rebuilding of the temple. Their overtures were rejected by the leaders of the new theocracy, who could not but fear the results of interfusion with so large a mass of men of mixed blood and very questionable orthodoxy; and so the Jehovah-worshippers of Samaria were thrown into the ranks of "the adversaries of Judah and Benjamin " (Ezra iv.). Nevertheless, down to the time of Nehemiah, the breach was not absolute; but the expulsion from Jerusalem in 432 B.C. of a man of high-priestly family who had married a daughter of Sanballat made it so; and it is more than probable, as has been explained in ISRAEL, vol. xiii. p. 419, that this priest is the Manasseh of Josephus, who carried the Pentateuch to Shechem, and for whom the temple of Gerizim was built. For, though the story in Josephus (Ant., xi. 8) is falsely dated and mixed with fable, it agrees with Neh. xiii. in too many essential points to be wholly rejected, and supplies exactly what is wanted to explain the existence in Shechem of a community bitterly hostile to the Jews, and yet constituted in obedience to Ezra's Pentateuch.

When we consider what difficulties were met with in the introduction of Pentateuchal orthodoxy even at Jerusalem, the foundation of a community of the Law in the Samaritan country, among the mixed populations whom the Judæan leaders did not venture to receive into fellowship, must appear a very remarkable exploit. The Samaritan religion was built on the Pentateuch alone; and the fact that they did not receive even those prophetic books and historical narratives which originated in Northern Israel (all which have been preserved to us only by the Jews) shows that, before they received the Pentateuch, their Jehovah-worship was a mere affair of traditional practice, uninspired by prophetic ideas and unsupported by written record of the great deeds of Jehovah in time past. It can hardly in any respect have risen above the level of the popular religion of North Israel as described and condemned by Hosea and Amos. In Judæa the duty of conformity to the Pentateuch was enforced by appeal to the prophets and to the history of the nation's sins and chastisements, and the acceptance of a vast and rigid body of ordinances was more easy because they came as the consolidation and logical development of a movement that had been in progress from the days of Isaiah: Among the Samaritans, on the other hand, the acceptance of the Pentateuch implied a tremendous

That it was possible to establish such a community on such a soil is a remarkable evidence that in that age the tendency to a legal religion was favoured by general causes, not confined to Judæa alone; it must be remembered that elaborate hierocracies sprang up after the fall of the old nationalities in many parts of western Asia (comp. PRIEST, vol. xix. p. 729). At the same time it must be remembered that, as Ezra could not have succeeded without Nehemiah, Manasseh had Sanballat's civil authority to back him. It is probable, too, that Josephus is right in assuming that he was strengthened by a considerable secession of Judæans, and it is not to be supposed that the " Samaritans" ever embraced anything like the whole population of the Samaritan country. Samaria itself was Hellenized in the time of Alexander; and in Ecclus. 1. 26 the foolish people that dwell at Shechem are distinguished from the inhabitants of the Samaritan hill-country in general.3 The Samaritans, like the Jews, throve and multiplied under the discipline of the law, but at no time in their history do they appear to have had the political importance that would have accrued to so closely knit a religious body if it had held all the fertile Samaritan district.

Jews and Samaritans were separated by bitter jealousies and open feuds (Jos., Ant., xii. 4, 1), but their internal development and external history ran closely parallel courses till the Jewish state took a new departure under the 1 This appears especially by comparison of the Samaritan Pentateuch with the Septuagint. It is not of course to be wondered at that the Judæan text is on the whole superior to the Samaritan, for the Samaritans had no opportunity of revising their text by Judæan copies. The Samaritan character is an independent development of the old Hebrew writing as it was about the time when they first got the Pentateuch. This in itself is an indication that from the first their text ran a separate course, and that there was no opportunity of checking corruptions that had got into it by reference to different recensions. In Judæa also there were important variations between MSS. down to the time of the Septuagint and even later, and in many cases the Septuagint readings agree with the Samaritan Pentateuch, showing an affinity between the sources of these two texts. ultimately the Jewish scribes were able to constitute or rather to

But

select an authoritative text, and whether by good luck or by judgment the text they chose was on the whole one of a singularly good type. The Samaritans never had opportunity to do anything of this kind. 2 Compare, for details and references, Nutt, Fragments of a Samaritan Targum, p. 37 sq., 42 sq., and Schürer, Gesch. des Jüdischen Volkes, p. 7 Josephus (Ant., xi. 8, 7) says they received Judæans who were accused of ritual irregularities, but, as he adds that the fugitives professed that they were falsely accused, it is plain that even this partisan writer did not venture to represent them as indifferent to ritual orthodoxy. No doubt, in addition to the legal ordinances, the Samaritans retained some ancient traditional practices, as they certainly introduced some new observances. Their passover, for example, has some peculiar features, one of which, viz., the application of the sacrificial blood to the faces of the children, has an exact parallel in the old Arabic 'akika. See the account of an eye-witness (Prof. Socin) in Bädeker's Palestine.

3 So all Greek MSS. The old Latin substitutes Mount Edom; the Sriac has "Gbel," which may mcan Ebal or the Edomite country.

bodies was increased by the adoption of the institution of the synagogue, and from the synagogue there certainly grew up a Samaritan theology and an exegetical tradition. The latter is embodied in the Samaritan Targum or Aramaic version of the Pentateuch, which in its present form is, according to Nöldeke's investigations, not earlier than the fourth Christian century, but in general agrees with the readings of Origen's Tò Zapapelтikóv. For the dogmatic views of the Samaritans our sources are all late; they embrace hymns and other books of little general interest, and mainly at least of medieval origin. Like the Jews, too, the Samaritans had a haggada; indeed the Arabic books they still possess under the name of chronicles are almost entirely haggadic fable with very little admixture of true tradition. The recent date of all this literature seems to show that the old Samaritans had not nearly so vigorous an intellectual life as the Jews, though what life they had moved in similar lines; indeed, having no sacred book but the Pentateuch, and having passed through no such national revival as that of the Maccabees, they lacked two of the most potent influences that shaped the development of Judaism. On the other hand, they shared with the Jews the influence of a third great intellectual stimulus, that of Hellenism. Samaritans as well as Jews were carried to Egypt by Ptolemy Lagi; the rivalry of the two sects was continued in Alexandria (Jos., Ant., xii. 1, 1), and Hellenized Samaritans wrote histories and epic poems in Greek with exactly the same patriotic mendacity which characterizes Jewish Hellenism. Of this, the oldest surviving Samaritan literature, some fragments have been preserved in the remains of Alexander Polyhistor.4

The troubles that fell on the Jews for their fidelity to the law, under Antiochus Epiphanes, were not escaped by the Samaritans (2 Mac. v. 23, vi. 2); the account in Josephus (Ant., xii. 5, 5) which makes them voluntarily exchange their religion for the worship of the Grecian Zeus is certainly a malignant falsehood.5

Under the Maccabees their relations with Judæa became very bitter, and they were severely chastised by Hyrcanus, who destroyed their temple. Hostilities between the two nations recurred from time to time; and in the New Testament, in Josephus, and in Jewish tradition we see how deep-seated was their mutual abhorrence. But, with all this, the sects were too nearly alike not to have much in common. The Roman yoke galled both in the same way; the Samaritan false prophet whose movement Pilate put down with cruel slaughter (Jos., Ant., xviii. 4, 1), and probably also Simon Magus and Dositheus (Orig., Cont. Cels., i. p. 44), are parallel phenomena to the false Messiahs that arose among the Jews. The original views of the Samaritans were like those of the Sadducees, and they did not believe in a resurrection or a Messiah; but it was impossible for their faith to survive under the cruel pressure of foreign bondage without absorbing something from Jewish eschatology. And so too, in the struggle of the Jews with Vespasian, perhaps also in that with Hadrian, the Samaritans forgot their old feud, and took part against the Romans. They seem also to have shared in great measure in the subsequent dispersion, for in later times we hear of Samaritans and Samaritan synagogues not only in Egypt but in Rome, and in other parts of the empire.

See especially Friedländer, Hellenistische Studien (1875), p. 82 sq. An Egyptio-Samaritan fragment has also been suspected by Ewald to be imbedded in the Sibyllina, xi. 239-244

See Appel, Quæstiones de Rebus Samaritanorum, 1874, p. 37 sq. • Josephus calls them Cuthæans (from 2 Kings xvii. 30), and will not admit that they are of Hebrew blood at all; the Rabbins use the same name, but are not always so positive in calling them pure Gentiles. The groundless accusation of dove-worship (which makes their religion that of the Syrian Aphrodite) arose in post-Mishnic times.

The Christian emperors made hard edicts against them as well as the Jews, and at length excluded them from the public service. Under these circumstances they naturally came to be mainly traders and merchants' clerks; in Constantinople "a Samaritan" meant "a banker's clerk." In their old homes they still remained numerous enough to make a serious insurrection under Justinian (529 A.D.). Its suppression was followed by very stern decrees against the whole sect, and Europe heard little more of the Samaritans till, towards the close of the 16th century, Western scholars took an interest in the few congregations that still remained in the East, at Cairo and Damascus as well as at Nábulus. It was found that during the Middle Ages they had formed an Arabic literature of considerable size but of little intrinsic worth, and had continued faithfully to preserve their scriptures. Since then their numbers have been constantly on the wane, and they have almost lost their old learning, which was never very considerable.

Samaritan Literature.-Of this a full account is given, along with a sketch of Samaritan history, in the introduction to Nutt's Fragments of a Samaritan Targum (1874). The following list confines itself to what has been printed. (a) The HebrewSamaritan Pentateuch, i.e., the Hebrew text in Samaritan recension and character, was first printed in the Paris polyglott. On the nature of this recension, see Gesenius, De Pent. Sam. origine, &c. (1815). A list of variations from the Massoretic text is given by Petermann, Hebr. Formenlehre nach der Aussprache der Samaritaner (1868). (b) Targum, also in the Paris and London polyglotts, but in very corrupt form. A critical edition of the whole is still lacking; the best text of part is that given by Nutt from a Bodleian MS. The dialect, apart from the corruptions of the text, differs little from other Palestinian Aramaic. (c) Aramaic having been supplanted in Palestine by Arabic, an Arabic version of the Pentateuch was made by Abû Sa'îd about 1100 A.D. The first three books have been edited by Kuenen (1851-54). On this version, see especially De Sacy in Mém. Acad. Inscr. et Belles-Lettres, vol. xlix. (a) The so-called Samaritan book of Joshua is an Arabic chronicle going down to Roman times, but of almost no historical use. It may date from the 18th century. Juynboll edited it in 1848 from a Leyden MS.; there are other MSS. in the British Museum and in Trinity College, Cambridge. (e) Another short chronicle, El-Tolidoth, published by Neubauer in Jour. As. (1869), seems to have used the Jewish Book of Jubilees. Both (d) and (e) with some other sources were used by-(f) The Chronicle of Abulfath, written in 1355, and continued by later hands; edited by Vilmar (Gotha, 1865). (g) A collection of hymns was published by Gesenius (Carmina Samaritana, 1824). Other liturgical pieces have been published by Heidenheim. () Specimens of Samaritar writings on Hebrew grammar were published by Nöldeke in the Göttinger Nachrichten (1862).

For the Samaritans in general, see Nutt, op. cit.; Juynboll, Comm. in Hist. Gentis Samar., Leyden, 1846; Appel, De Rebus Samaritanorum sub imperio Romano peractis. De Sacy published in the Notices et Extraits, xii. (1831), all the correspondence of the Samaritans with European scholars, and other material about the modern Samaritans. For the modern Samaritans see also Petermann's Reisen, vol. 1. (1860). For Makrizi's account of the Samaritans, see De Sacy, Chrest. Ar., vol. i. Other literature in Nutt and very fully in Kautzsch's article in Herzog-Pllit, vol. xiii. (W. R. S.)

SAMARKAND, a city of Central Asia, anciently Marcanda, the capital of Sogdiana, then the residence of the Sámánids, and subsequently the capital of Timur, is now chief town of the Zerafshan district of the Russian dominions. It lies in a richly cultivated region, 185 miles southwest of Tashkend, and 145 miles east of Bokhara, in 39° 39′ N. lat. and 67° 17′ E. long., 2150 feet above the sea, in the valley of the Zerafshan, at the point where it issues from the extreme western spurs of the Tian-Shan before entering the steppes of Bokhara. The Zerafshan now flows about three or four miles to the north of the city, supplying its extensive gardens with water.

Marcanda, a great city, whose walls had a compass of 90 stadia, was destroyed by Alexander the Great. It reappears as Samarkand at the time of the conquests of the Arabs, when it was finally reduced by Kotaiba ibn Moslim in 93 A.H. (711-712 A.D.). Under the Sámánids it became a brilliant seat of Arabian civilization. Its schools, its savants, were widely renowned; it was so populous that, when besieged by Jenghiz Khan in 1219, it is reported to

Plan of Samarkand. 1, Governor's house; 2, Burying-place of Russian soldiers who fell in the defence of 1868; 3, College of Ulug-beg; 4, College of Shir-dar; 5, College of Tilla-kari; 6, Grave of Timur; 7, Grave of Timur's wives. itants rose to 150,000. The magnificent buildings of the epoch of the successors of Timur, which still remain, testify to its former wealth. But new invaders again reduced it to ruin, so that at the beginning of last century it is reported to have been almost without inhabitants. It fell under Chinese dominion, and subsequently under that of the emir of Bokhara, suffering again and again from wars which were fought for it and around it. But no follower of Islam enters it without feeling that he is on holy ground, although the venerated mosques and beautiful colleges of Samarkand are falling into ruins, its high influence as a seat of learning has vanished, and its very soil is profaned by infidels. It was not without a struggle that the Mohammedans permitted the Russians to take possession of their holy city; and, while other cities of Central Asia submitted almost without striking a blow, Samarkand revolted in 1868, the Russian garrison. shut up in the citadel being rescued only by the timely arrival of a corps despatched from Tashkend.

The present city, which is but a wreck of its former self, is quadrangular in shape and is enclosed by a low wall 9 miles long. The citadel rises in the west, and to the westward of this again the Russians have laid out their new town, with broad streets and boulevards radiating from the citadel, while a pretty public garden, carefully irrigated, occupies the centre.

An

The central part of Samarkand is the Righistan-a square limited by the three madrasahs (colleges) of Ulug-beg, Shir-dar, and Tillakari; in its architectural symmetry and beauty this is rivalled only by some of the squares of Italian cities. Though differing immense doorway decorates the front of each of these large quadriin detail, the great lines of the three colleges are the same. lateral buildings. A high and deep-pointed porch, whose summit almost reaches the top of the lofty façade, is flanked on each side by a broad quadrilateral pillar of the same height, subdivided into three sections, each of which has its own style of decoration. Two fine columns, profusely decorated, in turn flank these broad pillars. On each side of the high doorway are two lower archways connecting it with two elegant towers, narrowing towards their tops and slightly inclined. The whole of the façade and also the interior courts are profusely decorated with enamelled bricks, whose colours blue, green, pink, or golden, but chiefly turquoise-blue-are wrought into the most fascinating designs, in striking harmony with the whole and with each part of the building. In the recess able elegance, and above it are the broad decorations filling up the of the deep doorway is the wide door, with proportions of remarkupper part of the arch. Over the interior are bulbed or melon-like domes, perhaps too heavy for the facade. The cool and shady

courts are surrounded by three stories of small rooms, each having only one opening-the door. The majestic buildings are now merely the dwellings of mollahs, who live on the revenues of the Wakf lands at Katty-kurgan.

The college of Shir-dar (built in 1601) takes its name from the two lious, or rather tigers, figured on the top of its doorway, which is richly decorated with green, blue, red, and white enamelled bricks. It is the most spacious of the three, and 128 mollahs inhabit its 64 apartments. The Tilla-kari ("dressed in gold"), built in 1618, has 56 rooms. But the most renowned of the three madrasahs is that of Ulug-beg, built in 1420 or 1434, by Timur, the grandson of the great conqueror. It is smaller than the others, but it was to its school of mathematics and astronomy that Samarkand owed its wide renown in the 15th century.

A winding street running north-east from the Righistan leads to a much larger square having the college of Bibi-khanym on the west, the graves of Timur's wives on the south, and a clean bazaar on the cast. The college was erected in 1888 by a Chinese wife of Timur, and is said to have once sheltered as many as a thousand students. It covers a large area, and has three mosques connected by a quadrangular building containing the students' rooms. The archway and towers of its façade are considered by Vambéry as a model for such buildings, and its decorations resist the destructive influences alike of time and of man. One of its mosques still raises its high bulbed dome above the outer walls, which are falling into ruins, and now give accommodation to the carts and the bazaar of traders in cotton. The lofty ruins of the grave of Timur's wives are really grand.

To the north, outside the walls of Samarkand, but close at hand, is the Hazreti Shah-Zindeh-the summer-palace of Timur; and near this is the grave of Shah-Zindeh, or, more precisely, Kotham ibn al-'Abbas ibn 'Abd al-Mottalib, a famous companion of the Prophet. This was already a famous shrine in the 14th century (Ibn Batuta, iii. 52); it is believed that the saint still lives in the mosque, and will one day rise for the defence of his religion. The Hazreti Shah-Zindeh covers a wide area on a terrace reached by forty marble steps. A series of galleries and rooms lead to the hall containing the relics of the saint. The decoration of the interior halls is marvellous. Another street running south-west from the Righistan leads to the Gur-Emir-the grave of Timur. This consists of a chapel crowned with an elegant dome, enclosed by a wall and fronted by an archway. Time and earthquakes have greatly injured this fine building; one of the minarets is already in ruins. The interior consists of two apartments paved with white marble, the walls being covered with elegant turquoise arabesques and inscriptions in gold. The chief room is of great beauty, and its decorations, of a bolder style than the others, are in strict harmony with the impression it is designed to produce. A large pyramidal piece of jade broken into two covers the grave of Timur, which has by its side that of his teacher, Mir Seid Berke, and those of several members of his family, all enclosed by a marble railing. A dark and narrow flight of steps leads down to the crypt, also ornamented with arabesques, where the graves are placed in the same order as in the upper hall. The citadel is situated on the west of the city, upon a hill whose steep slopes render it one of the strongest in Central Asia. Its walls, 3000 yards in circuit and about 10 feet high, enclose a space of about 4 square miles. It contained the palace of the emir of Bokhara,- -a vulgar. modern building now transformed into a hospital,—ar- the audience hall of Timur,—a long narrow court, surrounded by a colonnade, and containing the Keuk-tash, a grey stone 10 feet long, 4 feet broad, and 4 feet high, reported to have been brought from Brussa. On it Timur used to take his seat, surrounded by his numerous vassals; from it more recently the emirs of Bokhara also were wont to dispense their terrible justico. Ruins of former buildings-heaps of plain and enamelled bricks, among which Græco-Bactrian coins have been found-cover a wide area all around the present city, and especially on the west and north. The name of Aphrosiab is usually given to these ruins, which extend for nearly three miles to the westward of the present Russian town; this suburb of Samarkand was enclosed by a wall, the ruins of which can be traced for seven or eight miles. Five miles to the south-west of Samarkand is the college Khodja Akrar; its flower ornamentation in enamelled brick is one of the most beautiful of Samarkand. Rye is now grown in its courts, and its artistic ornamentation is going to ruin. To the north-north-east are the Tchupan-ata Hills, the chief of which has on its summit the grave of Daniar Polvan. On the right bank of the Zerafshan stands the village of Dehbid, peopled by descendants of Mahkdum Aazam (died in 1542), who possess a beautiful khanka (monastery), with pretty avenues of trees planted by Nezr Divabeghi in 1632. As for the famous Baghitchi-naran (the garden of plane trees), only the ruins of its palace now mark its former position; the trees have disappeared. Of the Græco-Armenian library said to have been brought to Samarkand. by Timur no traces have been discovered, and Vambéry regards the whole legend as a fable invented by Armenians. Every trace of the renowned high school Kalinderkhany has also disappeared.

The present Moslem city is an intricate labyrinth of narrow winding streets, having on both sides clay walls concealing dirty court-yards and miserable houses. The population was estimated at 36,000 in 1879; it consists of Tajiks (Iranians) and Sarts or Uzbegs. The Europeans numbered 5380. Somo 300 Jews occupy a separato quarter, remarkable for its filth. Numbers of Arabs, Persians, Afghans, Hindus, Kiptchaks, and Tsigans (Gipsies) may be met with in the strects. The chief occupation of the inhabitants is gardening; the gardens beyond the walls are extensive and very well kept. There is also a certain amount of manufacturing industry; tho workshops, which are small, aro thus enumerated by M. Kostenko:-for metallic wares, 12; for tallow and soap, 34; tanneries, 30; potteries, 37; for various tissues, 246. Those for dyeing and the manufacture of harness, boots, and silver and gold wares are also numerous. The best harness, ornamented with turquoises, and the finer products of the goldsmith's art, are imported from Bokhara or Afghanistan. The products of local potteries are very fine.

The bazaars of Samarkand, the chief of which is in the centre of the town, close by the Righistan, are more animated and kept with much greater cleanliness than those of Tashkend or Namangan. The trade carried on by local or Bokhara merchants is very brisk, the chief items being cotton, silk, wheat and rice, horses, asses, fruits, and cutlery. Wheat, rico, and silk aro exported chiefly to Bokhara; cotton to Russia, via Tashkend. Silk-wares and excellent fruits are imported from Shahri-Syabs, and rock-salt from Hissar. (P. A. K.)

chief-commissionership of the Central Provinces of India, SAMBALPUR, or SUMBULPOOR, a British district in the between 21° 2' and 21° 57' N. lat. and between 83° 16′ and 84° 21′ E. long. Exclusive of attached native states by which it is surrounded, Sambalpur contains an area of 4521 square miles. Including the native states, it is bounded on the north by Chutia Nagpur, on the east and south by Cuttack district, Bengal, and on the west by the Bilaspur and Raipur districts. the only important river in the district, flows through it, The Mahanadi, which is dividing it into unequal parts. The greater portion of Sambalpur is an undulating plain, with ranges of rugged hills running in every direction, the largest of which is the Bará Pahár, a mountain chain covering an area of 350 square miles, and attaining at Dibrígarh a height of 2267 feet above the plain. The Mahánadi affords means of water communication for 90 miles; its principal tributaries in Sambalpur are the Ib, Kelú, and Jhirá. To the west of the Mahanadi the district is well cultivated. The soil of the district is generally light and sandy. It is occupied for the greater part by crystalline metamorphic rocks; but part of the north-west corner is composed of sandstone, limestone, and shale. Gold dust and diamonds have been found near Hírakhudá or Diamond Island, at the junction of the Ib and Mahánadi. The climate of Sambalpur is considered very unhealthy; its average temperature is 79°, and its average annual rainfall is 58 inches.

The census of 1881 disclosed a population of 693,499 (346,549 males and 346,950 females). Hindus numbored 632,747 and Mohammedans 2966. The only town in the district with a population exceeding 5000 is SAMBALPUR, the administrative headquarters, with 13,939 inhabitants, situated in 21° 27′ 10′′ N. lat. and 84° 1' E. long., on the north bank of the Mahanadi. It has much improved since 1864, when a cart could only with great difficulty pass through the main street. Of the total area of the district 1125 square miles are cultivated, and of the portion lying waste 888 are cultivable. Rice forms the staple crop; other products are food grains, oil-seeds, cotton, and sugar-cane. The manufactures are few and of no great value. The gross revenue in 188384 was £22,445, of which the land contributed £11,388.

Sambalpur lapsed to the British in 1849, who immediately adopted a system of exaction and confiscation by raising the revenue assessments one-fourth and resuming the land grants, religious and others. Great dissatisfaction was the consequence, and the Brahmans, who form a numerous and powerful community, made an appeal, but obtained no redress. In 1854 a second land settlement again raised the assessments everywhere one-fourth. This system of exacticn produced its natural results. On the outbreak of the mutiny in 1857 a general rising of the chiefs took place, and it was not until the final arrest of Surandra Sá, a chief who for somo years had been the cause of great disturbances, in 1864 that tranquillity was restored; since then the district has enjoyed profound peace.