HAMAH HAMBACH 409 dus. Its king Toi yielded allegiance to David. Hamath was called great by Amos, and was ranked by the Assyrians among their most important conquests. According to Genesis, it was originally inhabited by the Canaanites, and it is frequently mentioned as the northern border of the promised land. Under the name Epiphania it became famous in the days of the Seleucidse, and it is said that Seleucus Nicator kept there his stud of 500 elephants and 30,- 000 brood mares. Under the Moslem rule it Characters of the Hamath Inscriptions. produced the celebrated scholar Abulfeda, prince of Hamah. The town has recently at- tracted considerable attention from the number of stones bearing inscriptions which have been found there. Burckhardt noticed these stones in 1812, but they remained in obscurity till 1870, when J. A. Johnson, consul general for the United States at Beyrout, and the Rev. S. Jessup of the Syrian mission, rediscovered them while looking through the bazaar of the old town. Copies and impressions of the in- scriptions were carried to England by Burton and Tyrwhitt-Drake, and to the United States by Lieut. Steever and Prof. Paine. Copies of them have been published by the English ex- ploration fund, by the anthropological society of Great Britain and Ireland, and by the Pal- estine exploration society of New York. Those issued by the last named in September, 1873, are absolute facsimiles prepared by W. H. Ward after the impressions of Steever and Paine. The inscriptions have been discussed by many eminent scholars, and notices of them have been published by Burton, Eisenlohr, Pe- termann, Hyde Clark, E. Thomas, Carter Blake, Staniland "Wake, the Rev. Dunbar J. Heath, and others. The stones are of black basalt, and the inscriptions are in relief. The writing is of an unknown character. Some of the signs resemble the Cypriote and others the Him- yaritic. Mr. E. Thomas has discovered that some small clay impressions of seals in the British museum are in the Hamath character ; they had been attached to documents in the palace of Sennacherib at Nineveh, and date from about 700 B. 0. In the Assyrian inscrip- tions appear a few notices of Hamath, which tend to show that the inhabitants were Semites, and that their neighbors to the north were a powerful tribe, called the Patina, who spoke a non-Semitic language. As the stones may have been removed from their original site to be used for building purposes in Hamath, it is possible that the inscriptions belong to the Patina. The various characters found in the Hamath in- scriptions are shown in the preceding column. HAMAN, a minister of the Persian king Aha- suerus, of the race of Agag, who, because Mor- decai the Jew refused to pay him homage, re- solved on the destruction of all the Jews in the Persian monarchy. He contrived to obtain a decree for this purpose ; but Esther, the Jew- ish wife of Ahasuerus, interposed for their'de- liverance, and Haman was hanged on the gib- bet he had prepared for Mordecai. His history is contained in the book of Esther. HAMAM, Joliann Georg, a German author, born in Konigsberg, Aug. 27, 1730, died in Munster, June 21, 1788. He was destined for the pulpit, but became a clerk in a mercantile house, and afterward held many small public offices, devoting his leisure to study. He wrote under the nom de plume of " the Magus of the North." His works consist of small essays, and although his style was diffuse and obscure, their merits were recognized by Lessing, Men- delssohn, Herder, and Goethe. Fragments of his writings were published by Cramer, under the title of SibylliniscJie Blatter des Magus am Norden (1819), and a complete edition by Roth (7 vols., 1821-'5, with a volume of additions and explanations by Wiener, 1843). Hamanrfs des Magus in Norden Leben und Schriften, ed- ited by Gildemeister, was published in 5 vols., 1857- 1 68, and a new edition of his Schriften und Briefen, edited by Petri, in 4 vols., 1872- '4. HAMBACH, a village of Rhenish Bavaria, near Neustadt, 15 m. W. of Spire; pop. about 2,200.
