Page:EB1911 - Volume 19.djvu/730

 made their way into the great collections. At the council of July 1096 Pope Urban II. presided, and sixteen disciplinary canons were adopted, which have many points of contact with the canons of the council of Clermont.

 NIMROD ( ; Septuagint,  : various reading in Gen. x. 8,  Vulg. Nemrod). Nimrod is only mentioned in three passages in the Bible; in Micah v. 6 Assyria is called “the land of Nimrod,” and 1 Chron. i. 10 quotes a portion of the third, the most important reference, Gen. x. 8-12. The last-named is ascribed to one of the oldest writers of the Pentateuch, the Yahwist; but not perhaps to the oldest stratum of his work (Ball, Sacred Books of the Old Testament). In Gen. x. 8, as Jabal was the inventor of music, so Nimrod was the first warrior, gibbôr, the first hunter, “he became a mighty hunter, gibbôr çayidh, before Yahweh, so that it is said, A mighty hunter before Yahweh like Nimrod”; the first builder of cities and ruler of a widespread dominion, “the beginning of his kingdom was Babel, Erech, Accad and Calneh in the land of Shinar. Out of that land he went forth into Assyria, and built Nineveh, Rehoboth-Ir, Calah and Resen between Nineveh and Calah (the same is the great city).” The general statement that Assyria was originally an offshoot and dependence of Babylon is substantially in accordance with Assyrian and Babylonian authorities. As the chapter stands, Nimrod is a descendant of Ham, cf. verses 6 and 8; but as Babylon and Assyria were Semitic, cf. verses 21, 22, and as verses 6, 7, on the one hand, and verses 8-12, on the other, come from different documents, we must dissociate the two consecutive paragraphs, and regard the “Cush” of verse 8 as the Babylonian Cash or Cassites, a people quite distinct from the Cush of verse 6, which is Ethiopia; the text and interpretation of portions of Gen x. 8-12 are doubtful. The “mighty hunter before Yahweh” has been variously explained as “a divinely great hunter” (Spurrell); “a hunter in defiance of Yahweh” (Holzinger); “a hunter with the help of Yahweh” or “of some deity whose name has been replaced by Yahweh” (Gunkel, Genesis, p. 82).

The name Nimrod has not been found in any ancient (say older than 500 ) non-Israelite document or inscription; and there is no conclusive evidence for identifying Nimrod with any of the names found in such documents. In the absence of evidence, the theories are naturally endless, especially as both the legendary and the historical heroes of the ancient East were often “mighty hunters.” Nimrod would suggest to a Jew or Syrian the idea of “rebel,” mrd＝rebel; but this is not likely to be the etymology. By regarding the “N” as performative, Nimrod has been identified with Merodach, the god of Babylon (Pinches, Hastings’s Bible Dict.). He has also been identified with Gilgamesh, the hero of the epic which contains the Babylonian Deluge story (Jeremias, Das A. T. im Lichte des alten Orients), with various historical kings of Babylonia, with Orion, &c., &c. As the name Nmrt (Petrie, Nemart) frequently occurs in Egyptian documents of the XXIInd Dynasty, c. 972–749 (Petrie, Hist. of Egypt, iii. 242, &c.), the story of Nimrod is sometimes (E. Meyer ap. Holzinger, Genesis) conjectured to be of Egyptian origin. Some support might be obtained for this view by supposing Cush in verse 8 to be Ethiopia as in verse 6; but it seems impossible to reconcile it with the statements in Genesis and Micah which connect Nimrod with Babylon and Assyria. It is possible that the Nebrod of the Septuagint (similarly Philo and Josephus) is the more ancient form of the name (Cheyne, Ency. Bibl.).

 NINE MEN’S MORRIS, known also as Morelles and Merelles, an ancient English game played with 9 counters a side on a board marked with four squares, one within the other. The middle points of the three inside squares are connected by straight lines, and, in a variation of the game, the corners also. The players, whose counters are of different colours, place these alternately one by one upon the intersections of the lines, the object of each being to get three of his own men in line, in which case he has the privilege of pounding, i.e. removing from the board, any one of his opponent’s men; although he may not take one of a row of three, unless there are no others. When all 18 counters have been placed on the board they are moved to adjacent unoccupied intersections. When all but three of a player’s men have been captured he is allowed to jump or hop to any vacant point he chooses. As soon as a player is reduced to two men he loses. In the time of Shakespeare (Midsummer Night’s Dream, Act . Scene 1) the game was commonly played out of doors.  NINEVEH (Heb. , in classical authors  , Ninus; LXX.  ,  ; Assyrian Ninā or Ninūa), the best known and highly renowned capital of the Assyrian empire. There was a quarter or suburb of the old Babylonian city of Lagash whose name was written in the same way; this may possibly have been the home of those settlers from Babylonia who gave its name to the Assyrian city. The name was carried elsewhere, probably by Assyrian settlers, and we meet with Ninoe in Asia Minor (Th. Nöldeke, Hermes, v. 464, n. 2). Philostratus calls a Hierapolis,  but it must not be confounded with the Egyptian Nï-y, Assur-bani-pal Nï, the frontier city to the east of Egypt’s greatest extension, where Tethmosis (Thothmes) III. hunted elephants, probably situated on the Euphrates. This, however, may be the origin of Ctesias’s statement (ap. Diod. ii. 3) that Nineveh stood on the Euphrates; the Arabic geographer Yaqut places a Nineveh on the, lower Euphrates near Babylon, and this may be a colony from the great Nineveh, or possibly the Ninā of Lagash.

The derivation of the name is uncertain. The name Ninā was borne also by the goddess Ishtar, whose worship was the special cult of Nineveh, and Ninūa may well be a hypocoristicon of Ninā. The ideogram for Nineveh, as also for the Lagash city, , is a fish enclosed in the sign for house, possibly indicating a fish-pond, sacred to Ishtar. As the Semitic nūnu means a fish, a play upon nūnu and Ninā is suggested, but the name may be pre-Semitic. A derivation from the root with a meaning like “lowland” is doubtful, unless we are sure that the name is Semitic, and that the Lagash city also lay low.

Nineveh was situated at the N.W. angle of an irregular trapezium of land which lay between the rivers Husur (Khausar, Choser) on the N.W., Gōmal on the N.E. and E., Upper Zāb on the S.E. and S. and Tigris on the S. and W. In extent this plain is 25 m. by 15 m., and contains the ruins of Nineveh at Kuyunjik and Nebi Yūnus, of Dūr Sargon at Khorsabad to the N.E. of Calah at Nimrud to the S. as well as of other towns not yet identified. The whole plain has a gradual slope from the low range of Jebel Maqtub and the hill of Ain-es-safra on the N.E. to the Tigris on the S.W. This Plain was, for those days, amply protected on three sides by the two rapid broad streams of the Tigris and its tributary Zāb, by the hills on the N.E. and the river Gōmal at their base. The Weak N.W. side was partly covered by the Husur, an impassable flood in winter but easily fordable in summer. The floods caused by the Husur were frequent and destructive, on one occasion sweeping away the palace terrace at Nineveh and exposing the tombs of the kings, on another isolating Khorsabad. A great series of dams was therefore constructed (mapped and described in “Topography<section end="Nineveh" />