Authorities.—J.L. Burckhardt, Travels in Arabia (London, 1829); F. Mengin, Histoire de l’Égypte, &c. (Paris, 1823); M.O. Tamisier, Voyage en Arabie (Paris, 1840).
(R. A. W.)
ASISIUM (mod. Assisi), an ancient town of Umbria, in a lofty situation about 15 m. E.S.E. of Perusia. As an independent community it had already begun to use Latin as well as Umbrian in its inscriptions (for one of these recording the chief magistrates—marones—see C.I.L. xi. 5390). It became a municipium in 90 B.C., but, though numerous inscriptions (C.I.L. xi. 5371-5606) testify to its importance in the Imperial period, it is hardly mentioned by our classical authorities. Scanty traces of the ancient city walls may be seen; within the town the best-preserved building is the so-called temple of Minerva, with six Corinthian columns of travertine, now converted into a church, erected by Gaius and Titus Caesius in the Augustan era. It fronted on to the ancient forum, part of the pavement of which, with a base for the equestrian statues of Castor and Pollux (as the inscription upon it records) has been laid bare beneath the present Piazza Vittorio Emanuele. The remains of the amphitheatre, in opus reticulatum, may be seen in the north-east corner of the town; and other ancient buildings have been discovered. Asisium was probably the birthplace of Propertius.
(T. As.)
ASKABAD, or Askhabad, a town of Russian central Asia, capital of the Transcaspian province, 345 m. by rail S.E. of Krasnovodsk and 594 from Samarkand, situated in a small oasis at the N. foot of the Kopet-dagh range. It has a public library and a technical railway school; also cotton-cleaning works, tanneries, brick-works, and a mineral-water factory. The trade is valued at £250,000 a year. The population, 2500 in 1881, when the Russians seized it, was 19,428 in 1897, one-third Persians, many of them belonging to the Babi sect.
ASKAULES (Gr. ἀσκαύλης [?] from ἀσκός, bag, αὐλός, pipe), probably the Greek word for bag-piper, although there is no documentary authority for its use. Neither it nor ἄσκαυλος (which would naturally mean the bag-pipe) has been found in Greek classical authors, though J.J. Reiske—in a note on Dio Chrysostom, Orat. lxxi. ad fin., where an unmistakable description of the bag-pipe occurs (“and they say that he is skilled to write, to work as an artist, and to play the pipe with his mouth, on the bag placed under his arm-pits”)—says that ἀσκαύλης was the Greek word for bag-piper. The only actual corroboration of this is the use of ascaules for the pure Latin utricularius in Martial x. 3. 8. Dio Chrysostom flourished about A.D. 100; it is therefore only an assumption that the bag-pipe was known to the classical Greeks by the name of ἄσκαυλος. It need not, however, be a matter of surprise that among the highly cultured Greeks such an instrument as the bag-pipe should exist without finding a place in literature. It is significant that it is not mentioned by Pollux (Onomast. iv. 74) and Athenaeus (Deipnos. iv. 76) in their lists of the various kinds of pipes.
See articles [Aulos] and [Bag-pipe]; art. “Askaules” in Pauly-Wissowa, Realencyclopadie.