Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 14.djvu/250

238 L A M L A M

of a mile from the town on the level ground of the plain of Batna stands the camp. It measures 1640 feet from north to south by 1476 feet from east to west, and in the middle rise the ruins of a prætorium. This noble building is 92 feet long by 66 feet broad and 49 feet high; its southern façade has a splendid peristyle half the height of the wall, consisting of a front row of massive Ionic columns and an engaged row of Corinthian pilasters. The ruins of both city and camp have yielded a rich harvest of inscriptions (Renier edited 1500, and there are 4185 in the Corpus Inscr. Lat., vol. viii.); and, though a very large proportion are epitaphs of the barest kind, the more important pieces supply a fair outline of the history of the place.

Lambæsa was emphatically a military foundation. The camp of the third legion (Legio III. Augusta), to which it owes its origin, appears to have been established between 123 and 129 A.D., in the time of Hadrian, whose address to his soldiers was found inscribed on a pillar in a second camp to the west of the great camp still extant. By 166 mention is made of the decurions of a vicus, 10 curiæ of which are known by name; and the vicus became a municipium probably at the time when it was made the capital of the newly founded province of Numidia. The legion was removed by Gordianus, but restored by Valerianus and Gallienus; and its final departure did not take place till after 392. The town soon afterwards declined. It never became the seat of a bishop, and no Christian inscriptions have been found among the ruins.

See Bruce; Peysonnel; L. Renier, Inscriptions romaines de l'Algerie, Paris, 1855; Gustav Wilmann, "Die Röm. Lagerstadt Afrikas," in Commentationes phil. in honorem Th. Mommseni, Berlin, 1877; Playfair, Travels in the Footsteps of Bruce, London, 1877. A ground plan of the ruins is given in Mém. des Antiq. de France, tom. xxi.

LAMBETH. See LONDON.

LAMECH, לֶמֶךְ, is a name which appears in each of the antediluvian genealogies, Gen. iv. 16-24 and Gen. v. In the first he is a descendant of Cain, and through his three sons father of the several avocations of early civilization; in the latter ha is father of Noah. In each case, though in different senses, he marks the close of the first epoch of the world's history. Since the publication of Buttmann's Mythologus it has come to be generally recognized that the two genealogies terminating in Lamech are divergent forms of a single list. The parallelism of the two is not confined to the identical names, Lamech and Enoch. Methuselah (Μαθουσαλα) not Methusael is the true reading of the LXX. in Gen. iv. 18, and there are some textual grounds for thinking that in the same verse Mehujael has displaced an older reading Mahalaleel. Kainan again is closely akin to Cain, and there is also a less close resemblance between Jared and Irad, while Enos (Enosh) and Adam both mean man. Thus the two series beginning with Enosh and Adam and ending in Lamech do not vary more than is often the case with different recensions of ancient name lists. See especially Lagarde, Orientalia, ii. 33 sq. Again it has been pointed out, especially by Wellhausen, Jahrb. f. D. Theol., 1876, p. 400 sq., that Gen. iv. 16-24 is in its original conception quite distinct from the history of the curse of Cain (Gen. iv. 1-15), and offers the history of the beginnings of existing civilization (verse 20 sq.), not of a civilization extinguished by the flood; and the continuation of this narrative is plausibly sought in the history of the tower of Babel, according to which the human race entered Babylonia from the east (comp. iv. 16 with xi. 2), whereas the movements of the sons of Noah start from Ararat. On this view we are to suppose that the oldest literary source of the Hebrew history of the origins of our race ignored the flood, and traced the beginnings of city life to a land east of Eden (Nod), which has no place in later geography, and of which Cain was the first settler. Lamech is a descendant of Cain, under whose sons the different special avocations of a very primitive civilization differentiate themselves. The mass of the people are tent dwellers and shepherds, their "father" or the patron of their occupation being Jabal; but the arts are also developed in two branches, the "father" of minstrelsy

being Jubal, while the art of metallurgy is traced back to Tubal Cain (LXX. simply Θοβελ). The etymologies of the proper names throw little light on this interesting concep tion; that of Lamech is quite obscure,^[1] and the names of the sons, if they are Semitic, may be all derived from the root (Hebrew characters), expressing the notion of "offspring." It is indeed conceivable that some of the names are of non-Semitic origin; tùpál in Persian and Turkish means bronze, and the nation of Tubal was known to the Hebrews for bronze- work (Ezek. xxvii. 13), which would go well enough with the fact that Ḳayn in Arabic means a smith. But on the other hand the wives and daughters of Lamech, as well as the other two sons, have names that point naturally to Hebrew roots, so that it is very doubtful how far one is entitled to press these foreign analogies in explaining what is certainly one of the oldest Hebrew traditions.

What we read in Genesis of Lamech and his race seems to be a mere fragment of an older and more copious tradi tion. He has two wives – Adah (עָדָה, ("ornament"?), a name which reappears in Gen. xxxvi. in the genealogy of the Edomites, and Zillah ((Hebrew characters), "shadow"). Ewald gives to these names a mythological colour by making Adah mean "aurora" (Arabic ghadât) in contrast to Zillah, "shadow"; but in that case we should expect the LXX. to transcribe the word by Γαδα not Αδα, as Irad is rendered Γαιδαδ. At the same time the unquestionable occurrence of names of gods in the Edomite genealogy where Adah recurs favours the view that something of the same sort may be found in Gen. iv. 16 sq. On the other hand it is certainly important that the sons of Lamech form two brotherhoods (verse 21) divided by their maternal descent. The fathers of pastoral life and minstrelsy stand apart from the father of metallurgy and his sister Naamah. Handicraft especially in metals is generally practised by foreigners among the Semitic nomads, so that Tubal Cain may very well represent another race, such as the non-Semitic people which introduced metallurgy in Chaldæa according to Assyriologists. The name Naamah ("gracious") is so plainly akin to the divine name Naaman (No'mân, Adonis) that we can scarcely refuse to compare what is said of her brother with the Phœnician legend in Philo Byblius (Euseb., Pr. Ev., I. x. 9) of two brothers, inventors of iron and iron-working, of whom one named Chrysor was skilled in sayings, incantations, and divina tion, and was worshipped as a sort of Phœnician Hephæstus. The details of Phœnician legend, however, in this as in other cases, are widely divergent from the Bible story. The savage "sword song" of Lamech is unique in the Bible, and breathes the true spirit of the desert: –

Adah and Zillah, hear my voice; Ye wives of Lamech, give ear unto my speech. I slay a man for a wound, A young man for a stroke; For Cain's vengeance is sevenfold, But Lamech's seventyfold and seven.

In the other form of the genealogy the line of Lamech is dissociated from the guilty Cain and leads up to Noah. This form of the tradition is much more recent, belonging to the Levitical or priestly narrator. Its chief importance is that it shows how inseparably Lamech and his genealogy were connected with the ancestry of the Hebrew race.

LAMEGO, a town in the district of Vizeu in the province of Beira, Portugal, is situated 6 miles south of the Douro, and about 50 miles east of Oporto. As the seat of a bishop, it contains a Gothic cathedral, a part of which is referred to the 14th century. One of the churches was