Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 16.djvu/51

Rh M E R M E R 41 a Queen Candace in Augustus s time when the Romans under Petronius advanced to Napata. Meroe was visited by Greek merchants ; and the astronomical expedition of Eratosthenes determined its latitude with great accuracy. An exploring party in the reign of Nero found that the country below Meroe, formerly the site of many towns, had become almost wholly waste (Pliny, vi. 29). From the Gth to the 14th century of our era the Christian (Jacobite) realm of Dongola occupied the place of the older kingdom. The ruins of Meroe and Napata were fully explored by Lepsius in 1844, and the monuments are pictured in his Denkmaler. MERSEBURG, the chief town of a district of the same name in the Prussian province of Saxony, is situated on the river Saale, 10 miles to the south of Halle and 17 to the west of Leipsic. It consists of a quaint and irregularly built old town, with two extensive suburbs, and contains six churches and several schools and charitable institutions. The cathedral is an interesting old pile, with a Romanesque choir of the llth, a transept of the 13th, and a Late Gothic nave of the 16th century. Among its numerous monuments is that of Rudolph of Swabia, who fell in 1080 in an encounter with his rival Henry IV. It contains two paintings by Lucas Cranach. Contiguous to the cathedral is the Gothic chateau, formerly the residence of the Saxon princes and the bishops of Merseburg. The town-house, the post-office, and the &quot; standehaus &quot; for the meetings of the provincial estates are also noteworthy buildings. The industries of Merseburg consist of the manufacture of card board and coloured paper, dyeing, glue-boiling, machine- making, calico-printing, tanning, and brewing. Its popu lation in 1880 was 15,205. Merseburg (i.e., &quot; march-town &quot;) is one of the oldest towns in Germany. From the 9th century down to 1007 it was the capital of a countsliip of its own name, and from 968 to 1543 it was the seat of a bishop. In the 10th, llth, and 12th centuries it was a favourite residence of the German emperors, and at this time its fairs enjoyed the importance afterwards inherited by those of Leipsic. The town was repeatedly visited by destructive conflagrations in the 14th to 17th centuries, and also suffered severely during the Thirty Years War. From 1656 to 1738 it was the residence of the dukes of Saxe- Merseburg. The great victory gained by the emperor Henry I. over the Huns in 933 is believed to have been fought on the Keusch- berg near Merseburg. MERTHYR TYDFIL, or MERTHYR TYDVIL, a parlia mentary borough and market-town of Glamorganshire, South Wales, is situated in a bleak and hilly region on the river Taff, and on several railway lines, 25 miles north- north-west of Cardiff and 30 east-north-east of Swansea. The town, which consists principally of the houses of work men, is for the most part meanly and irregularly built, and at one time, on account of its defective sanitary arrange ments, was frequently subject to epidemics of great severity. Within recent years great improvements have taken place, and the town now possesses both a plentiful supply of pure water and an excellent system of sewage. There are also some good streets with handsome shops, while in the suburbs there are a number of private residences and villas inhabited by the wealthier classes. Apart from its extensive iron and steel works, the town possesses no feature of interest. It is situated in the centre of the South Wales coal basin, and the rich coal-mines in the vicinity supply great facilities for the iron industries. At Merthyr Tydfil, which is said to have received its name from the martyr dom of a British saint Tydfil, there were smelting-works at a very early period, but none of any importance until 1755. From about forty years ago until 1875 the manufac ture of bar iron developed with great rapidity, but since then the production of steel has largely taken its place. The borough returns two members to parliament. The population of the urban sanitary district in 1871 was 51,9-19, and in 1881 it was 48,857; the population of the parliamentary borough, which includes the parish of Aber- dare and parts of the parishes of Llanwonno and Merthyr Tydfil and of Vainor (Brecon), and has an area of 29,954 acres, was in the same years 97,020 and 91,347. MERV, MERU, or MAOUK, 1 a district of Central Asia, situated on the border-land of Iran and Turan. The oasis of Merv lies in the midst of a desert, in about 37 30 N. lat. and 62 E. long. It is about 250 miles from Herat, 170 from Charjui on the Oxus, 360 from Khiva, and 175 from Gawars, the nearest point in the newly acquired (1881) Russian territory of Akhal. The great chain of mountains which, under the name of Paropamisus and Hindu-Kush, extends across the Asiatic continent from the Caspian to China, and forms the line of ethnic demarcation between the Turanian and Indo- Germanic races, is interrupted at a single point ; that point is on the same longitude with Merv. Through or near the Neighbourhood of Merv. troupe or gap which nature has created flow northward in parallel courses the rivers Heri-rud (Tejend) and Murghab, until they lose themselves in the desert of Kara-kum that large expanse of waste, known also as Turcomania, which spreads at the northern foot of the mountains, and stretches from the lower Oxus to the Caspian. Whether as a satrapy of Darius and subsequently as a province of Alexander, whether as the home of the Parthian race, whether as a bulwark against the destructive waves of Mongol invasion, or later as the glacis of Persian Khorasan, the valleys of those rivers the district of Merv 1 Merv is the modern Persian name. The river Margus, now the Murghab, on which was built the ancient city, is derived from Margu, the name of the province as recorded in the Behistan inscriptions of Darius. Spiegel connects the name Margu with old Bactrian meregho, bird, in allusion to the numerous swarms of birds that gather there. So, too, the river name Murghab means bird-water. The district ap pears to have been known in the 5th century as Marv-i-rud, so that the river was then the Marv. The name Merum for the district occurs in the Armenian geography ascribed to Moses of Khorene, written probably in the 7th century (ed. Patkanoff ). Maour is the Uzbek name, and of comparatively recent date. XVI. 6