Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 17.djvu/177

Rh N A G N A I 165 tccture, ornament the town ; but the palace, built of black basalt, profusely ornamented with wood carving, was burnt down in 1864, and only the great gateway now remains. The tombs of the Bhonsla kings lie to the south of the city. Nagpur docs a large and increasing trade, the chief imports being wheat and other grain, salt, country cloth, European piece goods, silk, and spices. Cloth forms the chief article of manufacture and export. The finer fabrics of Nagpur have long been famous, and are still, in spite of the competition of English stuffs, in great request. Most of the public offices are in the station of Sitabaldi. NAGY-KOROS (i.e., Great KOTOS) is a town, or rather an overgrown village, in Hungary, in the district and 50 miles to the south-west of Pesth. It lies in the midst of a sandy plain, and is a station on the railway from Pesth to Temesvar. In 1880 it contained 22,769 inhabitants, chiefly Protestants, who are engaged in wine- culture and the rearing of cattle and sheep. Its gymnasium is esteemed one of the best schools in Hungary. NAGY-V^RAD. See GROSSWARDEIN. NAHARRO, BARTOLOME&quot; DE TORRES, a Spanish dra matist of the period immediately preceding that of Cervantes and Lope de Vega, born at Torres in the neigh bourhood of Badajoz, was for some time a captive in Algiers, and after receiving his freedom visited the court of Leo X. at Rome. Here his satirical pen excited such hostility that he was compelled to fly to Naples, where he lived for some time under the protection of Fabricio Colonna, and where he published his Propaladia in 1517. He died in poverty and obscurity ; the time and place are unknown. See DRAMA, vol. vii. p. 420. NAHUM. &quot;The book of the vision of Nahum the Elkoshite&quot; ( Q;|n - 3, &quot;compassionate&quot;), which stands seventh among the minor prophets, is entirely directed against Nineveh, and predicts the utter destruction of the bloody and rapacious city, its empire, and its gods by the tardy but sure and irresistible vengeance of Jehovah. The fall of Nineveh is the deliverance of Judah ; Jehovah, so terrible to His adversaries, so unfailing in His righteous judgments, is a sure and gracious defender to them that take refuge with Him. It appears therefore that, when the prophet wrote, the Judseans were still suffering from Assyrian oppression, perhaps even from present or recent invasion, for in i. 15 [ii. 1] he speaks of the annual feasts and the sacrifices of the sanctuary as disturbed by the &quot; wicked one &quot; passing through the land. It is not, how ever, from a merely patriotic standpoint that Nahum regards the Assyrian harlot as Jehovah s enemy ; she is the enemy of mankind, who sells all nations through her witchcrafts and whoredoms that is, in the strength of her heathenish religion (iii. 4), and she shall perish with none to pity her, for all have suffered continually from the wickedness of the ruthless empire. The exordium in chap. i., which depicts Jehovah as the jealous and avenging God, is a noble utterance of faith in the righteousness which rules in the world s history. The other two chapters are entirely occupied with the catastrophe of Nineveh ; the battle without and within the walls is described with great poetic force, not in finished pictures but with broad effec tive strokes and daring imagery, and apparently with some local knowledge, though the latter is hardly so detailed as to justify the conclusion that the prophet had himself seen the imperial city. It might be argued on the same prin ciple that he had also seen No-Ammon or Thebes, a description of the sack of which forms an episode in chap, iii. 8 sq. The reference here seems to be to the taking of No by Assurbanipal (G. Smith, Hist, of Assurbanipal, 55, 70; Schrader, K. A. T., 2d ed., p. 450) about 660 B.C. an event only known from the Assyrian monuments. Nahum must have prophesied after this date, probably not long after, that is, in the troublous times of Manasseh, which agrees well with i. 15. To suppose that his pro phecy was occasioned by the actual approach of the Medes to destroy Nineveh, or by one of the earlier campaigns which preceded their final success, is arbitrary ; for the judgment is predicted on general principles of divine justice, and there is no indication that the prophet knew what nation was to execute it. His descriptions, though pictorially vivid, are historically quite vague. The details of the decadence of the Assyrian empire are in truth so obscure that to search for the immediate occasion of the prophecy is mere guesswork. The name Elkoshite (^K&amp;gt;pp$, in the LXX. EXxfo-alos thepronun- ciation therefore is uncertain) denotes the prophet s home or birth place. Jerome s mention of a ruined &quot; viculus Elcesi &quot; in Galilee stands quite alone ; Hitzig supports the idea that the prophet was a Galilsean by the name Capernaum, which probably means &quot; village of Nahum,&quot; but of what Nahum we do not know. The confused account by R. Jos. Schwarz (D. Hcil. Land, p. 149) of a grave shown as that of the prophet Nahum an hour north of Tiberias lacks confirmation. Internal evidence leads us rather to conclude that Nahum was a man of Judah, and John vii. 52 appears to show that he was npt held to be a Galilean in the time of Christ, when the fashion of localizing tombs of prophets was already in full force (Matt, xxiii. 29). Later tradition associated Nahum with the region against which he prophesied, and in the 12th century Benjamin of Tudela visited his synagogue at Mosul and his tomb in Babylonia. It was probably under Christian influence that the site of this tomb was ultimately fixed at Alkosh, the seat of the later Nestorian patriarchs, near the convent of Rabban Hormizd, a few miles north of Mosul, where it is now reverenced by Christians, Moslems, and Jews. The sepulchre is a simple plaster box without signs of antiquity (Layard, Nineveh, i. 233). The history of this identification of Elkosh is obscure ; it is mentioned in the 16th century by Masius (ap. Asse- mani, B. 0., i. 525), as also in two Nestorian MSS. written at Alkosh by the same scribe in 1709 (Wright, Cat., 1068) and 1713 (Assem., iii. i. 352) ; it seems, moreover, to be implied in a gloss of Bar Ali, given by Payne Smith (Thcs. Syr., 221), but not in Hoffmann s edition. On the other hand no very early notice either of the tomb or of the place has yet been found. Alkosh, but not the Nahum legend, is mentioned in a poem of the llth century in Cardahi, Liber Thesauri (Rome, 1875); the same author places one Israel of Alkosh in the 8th century, but the date is questionable (see Noldeke in Z. D. M. G., xxxi. 165). The grave is undoubtedly a fabrication, and the evidence is not favourable to Ewald s con jecture that the name is ancient and the place really the city of Nahum. His further conjecture that some difficult words in Nahum may be Assyrian has not been confirmed by students of the inscriptions. Literature. The commentaries on the minor prophets; 0. Strauss, Nahumi &amp;lt;Je Nino vaticinium, 1853. For a list of other books see Keuss, Gesc/i. d. A. T., p. 369. (W. K. S.) NAIADS. See NYMPHS. NAILS. A nail is a headed pin or spike of metal, commonly of iron. The primary and principal use of nails is in wood Avork (joinery and carpentery), but they are also employed in upholstery, shoemaking, saddlery, slating, sheet-metal working, horse-shoeing, and numerous other trades. The consumption in all civilized communities is enormous, but it is exceptionally great where timber houses and wooden erections generally prevail, as in the United States of America, and in many British colonies. Size, form of head, nature of point, and special uses all give names to different classes of nails. Thus we have the names tacks, sprigs, and brads for very small nails ; rose, clasp, and clout, according to the form of head ; and flat points or sharp points according to the taper of the spike. Arranged according to the manner in which they are manufactured, nails may fall into four principal classes : (1) ordinary or hand-wrought nails ; (2) machine- wrought and cut nails ; (3) wire or French nails ; and (4) cast nails. The nailer handicraft was at one time a great industry in the country around Birmingham, and to this day in conjunction with chain-making it constitutes an important though declining trade. It is essentially a family industry, carried on in the meanest of workshops, with a very few simple blacksmith s tools and appliances. The nails are forged from nail-rods heated in a small