and Persian writers place a town of the name of Ku- tha, in the tract near the Nahr-Malka, or royal canal (the fourth in Xenophon, Anab, i, 7), which connected the Euphrates and Tigris to the south of the present Bagdad. The site has been identified with the ruins of Totffibah, immediately adjacent to Babylon (Alns- worth's Assyria, p. 165; Eoiobel, Vdlkertafd, p. 252); the canal may be the river to which Josephus refers. Others prefer the conjecture of Stephen Morin (in Ugolini Thes. vii) and Le Clerc, which identifies tiie Cuthites with the Cosacei in Susiana (Arrian, Indie, xl ; Plin. Hist Nat, vi, 81 ; Died. Sic. xvii. 111 ; Mannert, ii, 498), a warlike tribe who occupied the mountain ranges dividing those two countries, and whose law- less habits made them a terror even to the Persian emperors (Strab. xi, 524 ; xvi, 744). They were nev- er wholly subdued until Alexander's expedition, and it therefore appears doubtful whether Shalmaneser could have gained sufficient authority' over them to ef> feet the removal of any considerable number ; their habits would have made such a step highly expedient, if practicable. Fflrst (Heb, Handwdrt, s. v.) identifies this district with the modem Khusistan of Susiana, the province Jutija of the cuneiform inscriptions of Behistun (Benfey, Die Pers. KeiUnschr. p. 18, 82). All these coi^ectures refer essentially to the same quarter, and any of them is preferable to the one suggested by Michaelis {Spicil, i, 104), that the Cuthites were Phce- nicians firom the neighborhood of Sidon ; founding it upon the connection between the Samaritans and the Sidonians, as stated in their letter to Alexander the Great (Joseph. Ant. 8, 6 ; xii, 5, 5), and between the Sidonians and the Cutheans, as expressed in the ver- sion of the Chaldee Paraphrast Pseudo-Jonathan in Gen. X, 19, who substitutes fi'^'^Jnia for ')1'i:£, and in the Targum, 1 Chron. i, 18, where a similar change is made ; this is without doubt to be referred to the tradi- tional belief that the original seat of the Phoenicians was on the shores of the Persian Gulf (Herod, i, 1). Rawlinson is confident that the ancient Cuth is identi- cal with the modem ruined site Ibrahim, about twelve miles from Babylon (Herod, i, 248, 515 ; Hist, Ev, p. 840 sq.). See Nebgal. After all, it is possible that there is some historical and et3rmological connection (129 changed to t^) between Cuth and the Cuth of Gen. ii, 18, which must have lain somewhere in the same quar- ter. See CnsH.
Cuthbert, St., an eminent monk, bora in the north of England in the beginning of the 6th century. His life, written by Bede, is fhll of marvellous stories ; but it 19 clear that he was an earnest and faithful minister. He was educated by the Scottish monks at Icolmkill. After being for some time a monk in the monastery of
CUTHBERT
618
CUTLER
MaQros, he became prior of the monastery of Lindis- farae. In 676 he withdrew to the island of Fame, where he lived a life of moet rigorooa asceticism aa a hermit, and enjoyed the reputation of working many miracles. In 685 he yielded to the entreaties of king Egbert, and accepted the episcopal see of Hexham. When be felt the approach of death he returned to his hermitage on Fame, and there died, March 20, 686. He is commemorated in the Roman Chorch March 20. " The fame of St Cnthbert had been great during his life ; it became far greater after his death. Churches were dedicated to him throughout all the country be- tween the Trent and Mersey on the south, and the Forth and Clyde on the north. When his tomb was opened at the end of eleven years, it was believed that his body was found incorrupt, and so for more than 800 years it was believed still to continue. It remained at Lindis&me till 875, when the monks, bearing it on their shoulders, fled inland from the ftiry of the Danes. After many wanderings through the south of Scotland and the north of England, it found a resting-place at Chester-le-Street in 882. It was trans- ferred to Ripon in 995, and in the same year it was re- moved to Durham. Here, enclosed in a costly shrine, and believed to work daily miracles, it remained till the Reformation, when it was buried under the pave- ment of the cathedral. The grave was opened in 1827, when a coffin, ascertained to have been made in 1541 — when the body was committed to the eartli — was found to enclose another, which there was reason to suppose had been made in 1104 ; and this again en- closed a third, which answered the description of one made in 698, when the saint was raised from his first grave. This innermost case contained, not, indeed, the incorruptible body of St. Cnthbert, but his skele- ton, still entire, wrapped in five robes of embroidered silk. Fragments of these, and of the episcopal vest- ments, together with a comb and other relics, found beside the bones, are to be seen in the cathedral libra- ry. The asceticism which distinguished St Cnthbert in life long lingered round his tomb. Until the Ref- ormation, no woman was suffered to approach hb shrine ; the cross of blue marble still remains in the cathedral floor which marked the limits beyond which female footsteps were forbidden to pass, under pain of instant and signal punishment ftt)m the offended saint His wrath, it was believed, was equally prompt to avenge every injury to the honor or possessions of his church. It was told that William the Conqueror, anxious to see the incorrapt body of the saint, ordered the shrine to be broken up ; but scarcely had a stroke been strack, when such sickness and terror fell upon the king that he rushed from the cathedral, and, mounting his horse, never drew bridle till he had crossed the Tees I A cloth, said to have been used by St Cuthbert in celebrating mass, was fashioned into a standard, which was believed to insure victory to the army in whose ranks it was carried. Flodden was only one of many fields in which the defeat of the Scots was ascribed to the bcmner of St Cuthbert. It hung beside his shrine until the Reformation, when it is said to have been burnt by Calvin's sister, the wife of the first Protestant dean of the cathedral. The life of St. Cuthbert was twice writen by the Venerable Bede— briefly in vigorous hexameters in his Liber de Miraculis Sancti CuihbercH Episcopi; at greater length in prose, in his Libtr de Vila et MiracuUi Sancti Cutk- bercH Linditfamensit Episcopi. In this latter work he made use of an earlier life by a monk of Lindisfarae, which is still preserved. Besides these lives — all of which have been printed more than once — and what is told of St. Cuthbert in Bede's Higtoria Ecdetiattica Gentis Anglorum, the chief ancient authorities are the Hiftoria TramkUioma S, CuthberH^ published by the Bollandists in the Acta Sanctorum^ meru. MartU, vol. iii ; the UbeUug de Exordio Dunhelmenais Ec€k»a, by Symeon of Durham ; the UbeHus de NoHvitate 8. Cvtk-