in Ancient Geography, a district in Asia, whence Shalmaneser transplanted certain colonists into the land of Israel, which he had desolated (2 Kings xviii. 24-30). From the intermixture of these colonists with the remaining natives sprung the Samaritans, who are called Cuthites in the Chaldee and the Talmud; and for the same reason a number of non-Semitic words which occur in the Samaritan dialect are called Cuthian. The situation of the Cuthah from which these colonists came is altogether unknown. Josephus places it in central Persia, and finds there a river of the same name (Antiq. ix. 14. 3; x. 9, 7). Rosenmüller and others incline to seek it in the Arabian Irak, where Abulfeda and other Arabic and Persian writers place a town of this name, in the tract near the Nahr-Malca, or royal canal, which connected the Euphrates and Tigris, southward of the present Baghdad. Winer seems to prefer the conjecture of Stephen Morin and Le Clerc, which identifies the Cuthites with the Cossaei in Susiana. All these conjectures refer essentially to the same quarter, and any of them is preferable to the one suggested by Michaelis,—that the Cuthites were Phoenicians from the neighbourhood of Sidon,—which he founds upon reasons which no one regards as satisfactory, and which it is therefore unnecessary to reproduce.