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 NEARCHUS, one of the officers in the army of Alexander the Great. A native of Crete, he settled at Amphipolis in Macedonia. In 325, when Alexander descended the Indus to the sea, he ordered Nearchus to conduct the fleet to the head of the Persian Gulf. The success with which Nearchus accomplished this arduous enterprise led to his selection by Alexander for the more difficult task of circumnavigating Arabia from the mouth of the Euphrates to the Isthmus of Suez. But this project was cut short by the illness and death of the king (323). In the troubles that followed Nearchus attached himself to Antigonus, under whom he held the government of his old provinces of Lycia and Pamphylia, and probably therefore shared in the downfall (301) of that monarch.

He wrote a detailed narrative of his expedition, of which a full abstract was embodied by Arrian in his Indica—one of the most interesting geographical treatises of antiquity.

NEATH (Welsh, Castell-Nêdd), a municipal and contributory parliamentary borough, seaport and market-town of Glamorganshire, south Wales, prettily situated near the mouth of the Neath or Nédd, on the Great Western and the Rhondda and Swansea Bay railways, 7 m. E.N.E. of Swansea and 183 m. by rail from London, via Badminton. The Neath and Brecon railway has a terminus in the town. Pop. (1901) 13,720. The principal buildings are the parish church of St Thomas (restored 1874), the church of St David (1866), a Roman Catholic church, and Baptist, Calvinistic, Methodist, Congregational and Wesleyan chapels; the intermediate and technical schools (1895), Davies’s endowed (elementary) school (1789), the Gwyn Hall (1888), the town hall, with corn exchange in the basement storey, and the market-house. According to tradition Iestyn-ap-Gwrgan, the last prince of Glamorgan, had a residence somewhere near the present town, but Fitzhamon, on his conquest of Glamorgan, gave the district between the Neath and the Tawè to Richard de Granaville (ancestor of the Granvilles, marquesses of Bath), who built on the west banks of the Neath first a castle and then in 1129 a Cistercian abbey, to whose monks he later gave all his possessions in the district. All traces of this castle have disappeared. Another castle, built in the same century, on the east bank, was held direct by the lords of Glamorgan, as the westernmost outpost of their lordship. It was frequently attacked by the Welsh, notably in 1231 when it was taken, and the town demolished by Llewelyn ab Iorwerth. The portcullis gate and a tower are all that remain of it; of the abbey which was at one time the finest in Wales, there still exist the external walls, with parts of the chapel, vaulted chapter-house, refectory and abbot’s house. This abbey was the spot where Edward II. found shelter after his escape from Caerphilly. At the dissolution the abbey and the manor of Cadoxton (part of its possessions) were sold to Sir Richard Williams or Cromwell. Its cartulary has been lost. Copper smelting has been carried on in or near the town since 1584 when the Mines Royal Society set up works at Neath Abbey; the industry attained huge proportions a century later under Sir Humphrey Mackworth, who from 1695 carried on copper and lead smelting at Melincrythan. Besides its copper works the town at present possesses extensive tinplate, steel and galvanized sheet works as well as iron and brass foundries, steam-engine factories, brick and tile works, engineering works, flannel factories and chemical works. In the neighbourhood there are numerous large collieries, and coal is shipped from wharves on the riverside, vessels of 300 or 400 tons being able to reach the quays at high tide. The Neath Canal, from the upper part of the Vale of Neath to Briton Ferry (13 m.) passes through the town, which is also connected with Swansea by another canal. There is a large export trade in coal, copper, iron and tin, mostly shipped from neighbouring ports, while the principal imports are timber and general merchandise. Neath is included in the Swansea parliamentary district of boroughs.

The town perhaps occupies the site of the ancient Nidus or Nidum of the Romans on the Julia Maritima from which a vicinal road branched off here for Brecon. No traces of Roman antiquities, however, have been found. Neath is a borough by prescription and received its first charter about the middle of the 12th century from William, earl of Gloucester, who granted its burgesses the same customs as those of Cardiff. Other charters were granted to it by successive lords of Glamorgan in 1290, 1340, 1359, 1397, 1421 and 1423. By the first of these (1290) the town was granted a fair on St Margaret’s Day (July 20) and as the abbey had extensive sheep walks the trade in wool was considerable. In 1685 James II. granted a charter, which, however, was not acted upon except for a short time.

 NEBO, or (“the proclaimer”), the name of one of the chief gods of the Babylonian pantheon, the main seat of whose worship was at Borsippa—opposite the city of Babylon. It is due to the close association of Borsippa with Babylon after the period when Babylon became the centre of the Babylonian empire that the cult of Nebo retained a prominence only some degrees less than that of Marduk. The amicable relationship between the two was expressed by making Nebo the son of Marduk. In this case the expression of the relationship in this form was intended to symbolize the superiority of Marduk, different, therefore, from the view involved in making Marduk the son of (q.v.), which meant that the prerogatives of Ea were transferred to Marduk by the priests of Babylon.

Borsippa became in the course of time so completely a mere adjunct to Babylon that one might fairly have expected the Nebo cult to have been entirely absorbed by that of Marduk. Since that did not happen, the legitimate inference is that other deterrent factors were at play. One of these factors was the position that Nebo had acquired as the “god of wisdom” to whom more particularly the introduction of writing was ascribed. He takes his place, therefore, by the side of Ea as a cultural deity. The wisdom associated with him had largely to do with the interpretation of the movements in the heavens, and the priests of Nebo at an early age must have acquired widespread fame as astrologers. Assuming now, for which there is a reasonable amount of confirmatory evidence, that the priestly school of Nebo had acquired a commanding position before Babylon rose to political importance we can understand why the worshippers of Marduk persisted in paying homage to Nebo, and found a means of doing so without lowering the dignity and standing of their own god. If Assur-bani-pal, the king of Assyria (668–626 ), in the subscripts to the copies of Babylonian literary tablets invokes as he invariably does Nebo and his consort Tashmit as the gods of writing to whom all wisdom is traced, it is fair to assume that in so doing he was following ancient tradition and that the priests of Marduk likewise were dependent upon the school at Borsippa for their knowledge and wisdom.

Nebo is therefore an older god than Marduk in the sense that his specific prerogative as the god of wisdom was too firmly recognized when Marduk became the head of the Babylonian pantheon to be set aside.

The temple school at Borsippa continued to flourish until the end of the neo-Babylonian empire, and. school texts of various contents, dated in the reigns of Artaxerxes, Cambyses and Darius, furnish the evidence that the school survived even the conquest of Babylonia by Cyprus (538 ). The original character of Nebo can no longer be determined with any degree of definiteness. He may have been a solar deity, but there are also decided indications which point to his being a water-deity—like Ea. It may be, therefore, that if he shows the traits of a solar deity, this may be due to the influence of the neighbouring Marduk cult, just as in return Marduk takes on attributes that belong of right to Nebo. Thus, as the god of writing, Nebo has charge of the tables of fate on which he inscribes the names