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, (
Hebrew characters), 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 ((Greek characters)) 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 (Greek characters)). 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 ((Hebrew characters)("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 (Greek characters) not (Greek characters), as Irad is rendered
(Greek characters). 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
1 The conjectures and supposed parallels offered by Ewald (Geschichte, i. 382, 391; Jahrb, vi. 2) and Movers (i. 476 sq.) offer no safe basis for speculation. G. Smith (Chaldæan Genesis,' ch. xvii.) proposes to identify the name with the Accadian Dumugu and Lamga, "moon."
- ↑ 1
