According to the Tanakh, Cuthah was one of the five Syrian and Mesopotamian cities from which Sargon II, King of Assyria, brought settlers to take the places of the exiled Israelites (). II Kings relates that these settlers were attacked by lions, and interpreting this to mean that their worship was not acceptable to the deity of the land, they asked Sargon to send someone to teach them, which he did.

The result was a mixture of religions and peoples, the latter being known as "Cuthim" in Hebrew and as "Samaritans" to the Greeks.^[1].

In the Assyrian inscriptions "Cutha" occurs on the Shalmaneser obelisk, line 82, in connection with Babylon. Shulgi (formerly read as Dungi), King of Ur, built the temple of Nergal at Cuthah,^[2] which fell into ruins, so that Nebuchadnezzar had to rebuild the "temple of the gods, and placed them in safety in the temple".^[3] This agrees with the Biblical statement that the men of Cuthah served Nergal.^[4] Cuthah has been identified with the ruins of Tell Ibrahim, northeast of Babylon, uncovered by Hormuzd Rassam. The site of the Nergal temple can still be pointed out. Josephus places Cuthah, which for him is the name of a river and of a district,^[5] in Persia, and Neubauer^[6] says that it is the name of a country near Kurdistan.

The so-called "Legend of the King of Cuthah", a fragmentary inscription of the Akkadian literary genre called narū, written as if it were transcribed from a royal stele, is in fact part of the "Legend of Naram-Sin", not to be read as history, found in the cuneiform library at Sultantepe, north of Harran.^[7]

See also

• Samaritan

References

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