and delightful drawings. The design for the Diploma for the Fisheries Exhibition (1883) is of its kind one of the most extraordinary things in English art. As a political designer, while distinguished for wit and force, he was invariably refined and good-humoured to the uttermost; yet it is essentially as an artist that he takes his highest place. He died on the 3rd of August 1910.
See M. H. Spielmann, The History of Punch (London, 1895).
SAMBUCA, Sambute, Sambiut, Sambue, Sambuque, an
ancient stringed instrument of Asiatic origin generally supposed
to be a small triangular harp of shrill tone (Arist. Quint. Meib.
ii. p. 101). The sambuca was probably identical with the
Phoenician sabecha and the Aramaic sabka, the Greek form being
σαμβύχη. The sabka is mentioned in Dan. iii. 5, 10, 15, where
it is erroneously translated sackbut. The sambuca has been
compared to the military engine of the same name by some
classical writers; Polybius likens it to a rope ladder; others
describe it as boat-shaped. Among the musical instruments
known, the Egyptian nanga best answers to these descriptions.
These definitions are doubtless responsible for the medieval
drawings representing the sambuca as a kind of tambourine,[1]
for Isidor elsewhere defines the symphonia as a tambourine.
During the middle ages the word sambuca was applied (1) to a
stringed instrument about which little can be discovered, (2) to
a wind instrument made from the wood of the elder tree
(sambūcus). In an old glossary (Fundgruben, i. 368), article vloyt
(flute), the sambuca is said to be a kind of flute. “Sambuca vel
sambucus est quaedam arbor parva et mollis, unde haec sambuca
est quaedam species symphoniae qui fit de illa arbore.” Isidor
of Seville (Etym. 2. 20) describes it as “Sambuca in musicis
species est symphoniarum. Est enim genus ligni fragilis unde et
tibiae componuntur.” In a glossary by Papias of Lombardy
(c. 1053), first printed at Milan in 1476, the sambuca is described
as a cithara, which in that century was generally glossed “harp,”
i.e. “Sambuca, genus cytherae rusticae.”
In Tristan (7563-72) the knight is enumerating to King Marke all the instruments upon which he can play, the sambiut being the last mentioned:
| “ | Waz ist daz, lieber mann? — Daz veste Seitspiel daz ich kann.” |
In a Latin-French glossary (M.S. at Montpelier, H. 110, fol. 212 v.) Psalterium = sambue. During the later middle ages sambuca was often translated sackbut in the vocabularies, whether merely from the phonetic similarity of the two words has not yet been established. The great Boulogne Psalter (xi. c.) contains, among other fanciful instruments which are evidently intended to illustrate the equally vague and fanciful descriptions of instruments in the apocryphal letter of S. Jerome, ad Dardanum, a Sambuca, which resembles a somewhat primitive sackbut (q.v.) without the bell joint. It is reproduced by Coussemaker, Lacroix and Viollet-le-Duc, and has given rise to endless discussions without leading to any satisfactory solution. (K. S.)
SAMLAND, a peninsula of Germany, in the province of East
Prussia, on the Baltic. It separates the F risches Haff on the W.
from the Kurisches Haff on the N .E., and is bounded on the S.
by the river Pregel and on the E. by the Deime. Its shape is
oblong; it is 43 m. long, and 18 broad, and has an area of goo
sq. m. The surface is mostly flat, but on the W. sand-hills rise
to a height of 300 ft. The chief product is amber. The former
episcopal see of Samland was founded by Pope Innocent IV.
in 1249 and subordinated to the archbishop of Riga. Bishop
Georg von Polentz embraced the Reformation in IS23, and in
1525 the district was incorporated with the duchy of Prussia.
See Reusch, Sagen des preussischen Samlandes (2nd ed., Konigsberg,
1863); jankowsky, Das Samland und seine Beviilkerung
(Ktinigsberg, 1902); Hensel, Samland Wegweiser (4th ed., Konigsberg,
1905); and the Urkundenbuch des Blstums Samland, edited by
Wolky and Mendthal (Leipzig, 1891-1904).
see Michael Praetorius, syn¢ 'Mm. (w01f@nbuf¢e1, 1618), IS. 548 and pl. 42, where the illustration resembles a tambourine, but the descxiipition mentions strings, showing that the author himself was puzz .
SAMNAN, Simnan, or Semnan, a small province of Persia,
which, including the city and district of Damghan, is generally
known as “Samnan va Damghan.” It is bounded on the W.
by the districts of Khar (the ancient Choara) and Fjruzkuh, on
the N. by Mazandaran, and on the E. by Shahrud and Bostam.
In the S. it extends beyond the oasis of Jendek in the desert N.
of Yezd. Its northern part is still known as Komush or Komish,
the ancient Commisene. The revenue amounts to about £7000
per annum.
Samnan, the capital of the province, is situated 145 m. E. of Teheran, on the high road thence to Meshed, at an altitude of 3740 ft. in 35° 34' N., 53° 22' E. It has a population of about 10,000, post and telegraph offices, and a fine minaret, built in the 12th century. It exports pistachios, almonds and coarse tobacco. A dialect with many old Persian forms and resembling the Mazandaran dialect is spoken.
A. Houtum-Schindler, “Bericht über d. Samnán Dialect,” Zeitsch. d. morgenl. Gesellschaft, vol. xxxii. (1878).
SAMNITES, the name given by the Romans to the warlike
tribes inhabiting the mountainous centre of the S. half of Italy.
The word Samnites was not the name, so far as we know, used
by the Samnites themselves, which would seem rather to have
been (the Oscan form of) the word which in Latin appears as
Sabini (see below). The ending of Samnites seems to be
connected with the name by which they were known to the Greeks'
of the Carnpanian coast, which by the time of Polybius had
become Σαυνῖται; and it is in connexion with the Greeks of
Cumae and Naples that we first hear of the collision between
Rome and the Samnites.[2] We know both from tradition and
from surviving inscriptions (see Osca Lingua and R. S. Conway,
The Italic Dialects, pp. 169 to 206) that they spoke Oscan;
and tradition records that the Samnites were an offshoot of the
Sabines (see e.g. Festus, p. 326 Mueller). On two inscriptions,
of which one is unfortunately incomplete, and the other is the
legend on a coin of the Social War, we have the form Safinim,
which would be in Latin *Sabinium, and is best regarded as
the nominative or accusative singular, neuter or masculine,
agreeing with some substantive understood, such as nummum
(see R. S. Conway, ibid. pp. 188 and 216).
The abundance of the ethnica ending in the suffix -no- in all the Samnite districts classes them unmistakably with the great Safine stock, so that linguistic evidence confirms tradition (see further Sabini). The Samnites are thus shown to be intimately related to the patrician class at Rome (see Rome: history, ad init.), so that it was against their own stock that the Romans had to fight their hardest struggle for the lordship of Italy, a struggle which might never have arisen but for the geographical accident by which the Etruscan and Greek settlements of Campania divided into two halves the Safine settlements in central Italy.
The longest and most important monument of the Oscan language, as it was spoken by the Samnites (in, probably, the 3rd century B.C.) is the small bronze tablet, engraved on both sides, known as the Tabula Agnonensis, found in 1848 at the modern village Agnone, in the heart of the Samnite district, not very far from the site of Bovianum, which was the centre of the N. group of Samnites called Pentri (see below). This inscription, now preserved in the British Museum, is carefully engraved in full Oscan alphabet, and perfectly legible (facsimile given by Mommsen, Unteritalische Dialekte, Taf. 7, and by I. Zvetaieff, Sylloge inscriptionum Oscarum). The text and commentary will be found in Conway, op. cit. p. 191: it contains a list of deities to whom statues were erected in the precinct sacred to Ceres, or some allied divinity, and on the back a list of deities to whom altars were erected in the same place. Among those whose names are immediately intelligible may be mentioned those of “ Jove the Ruler ” and of “ Hercules Cerealis.” The other names are full of interest for the student of both the languages
- ↑ See Michael Praetorius, Synt. Mus. (Wolfenbüttel, 1618), p. 248 and pl. 42, where the illustration resembles a tambourine, but the description mentions strings, showing that the author himself was puzzled.
- ↑ For the difficult questions involved in the obscure and fragmentary accounts of the so-called First Samnite War, which ended in 341 B.C., the reader is referred to J. Beloch, Campanien, 2nd ed., pp. 442 ff., and to the commentators on Livy vii. 29 ff.
