[7] This is the correct form, Arka-tagh meaning the Farther or Remoter Mountains. The form Akka-tagh is incorrect.
[8] The form Tumenlik-tagh is erroneous.
KUFA, a Moslem city, situated on the shore of the Hindieh canal, about 4 m. E. by N. of Nejef (32° 4´ N., 44° 20´ E.), was founded by the Arabs after the battle of Kadesiya in A.D. 638 as one of the two capitals of the new territory of Irak, the whole country being divided into the sawads, or districts, of Basra and Kufa. The caliph ‘Ali made it his residence and the capital of his caliphate. After the removal of the capital to Bagdad, in the middle of the following century, Kufa lost its importance and began to fall into decay. At the beginning of the 19th century, travellers reported extensive and important ruins as marking the ancient site. Since that time the ruins have served as quarries for bricks for the building of Nejef, and at the present time little remains but holes in the ground, representing excavations for bricks, with broken fragments of brick and glass strewn over a considerable area. A mosque still stands on the spot where ‘Ali is reputed to have worshipped. (For history see [Caliphate].)
KUHN, FRANZ FELIX ADALBERT (1812-1881), German philologist and folklorist, was born at Königsberg in Neumark on the 19th of November 1812. From 1841 he was connected with the Köllnisches Gymnasium at Berlin, of which he was appointed director in 1870. He died at Berlin on the 5th of May 1881. Kuhn was the founder of a new school of comparative mythology, based upon comparative philology. Inspired by Grimm’s Deutsche Mythologie, he first devoted himself to German stories and legends, and published Märkische Sagen und Märchen (1842), Norddeutsche Sagen, Märchen und Gebräuche (1848), and Sagen, Gebräuche und Märchen aus Westfalen (1859). But it is on his researches into the language and history of the Indo-Germanic peoples as a whole that his reputation is founded. His chief works in this connexion are: Zur ältesten Geschichte der Indogermanischen Völker (1845), in which he endeavoured to give an account of the earliest civilization of the Indo-Germanic peoples before their separation into different families, by comparing and analysing the original meaning of the words and stems common to the different languages; Die Herabkunft des Feuers und des Göttertranks (1859; new ed. by E. Kuhn, under title of Mythologische Studien, 1886); and Über Entwicklungsstufen der Mythenbildung (1873), in which he maintained that the origin of myths was to be looked for in the domain of language, and that their most essential factors were polyonymy and homonymy. The Zeitschrift für vergleichende Sprachforschung auf dem Gebiete der Indogermanischen Sprachen, with which he was intimately connected, is the standard periodical on the subject.
See obituary notice by C. Bruchmann in Bursian’s Biographisches Jahrbuch (1881) and J. Schmidt in the above Zeitschrift, xxvi. n.s. 6.
KÜHNE, WILLY (1837-1900), German physiologist, was born at Hamburg on the 28th of March 1837. After attending the gymnasium at Lüneburg, he went to Göttingen, where his master in chemistry was F. Wöhler and in physiology R. Wagner. Having graduated in 1856, he studied under various famous physiologists, including E. Du Bois-Reymond at Berlin, Claude Bernard in Paris, and K. F. W. Ludwig and E. W. Brücke in Vienna. At the end of 1863 he was put in charge of the chemical department of the pathological laboratory at Berlin, under R. von Virchow; in 1868 he was appointed professor of physiology at Amsterdam; and in 1871 he was chosen to succeed H. von Helmholtz in the same capacity at Heidelberg, where he died on the 10th of June 1900. His original work falls into two main groups—the physiology of muscle and nerve, which occupied the earlier years of his life, and the chemistry of digestion, which he began to investigate while at Berlin with Virchow. He was also known for his researches on vision and the chemical changes occurring in the retina under the influence of light. The visual purple, described by Franz Boll in 1876, he attempted to make the basis of a photochemical theory of vision, but though he was able to establish its importance in connexion with vision in light of low intensity, its absence from the retinal area of most distinct vision detracted from the completeness of the theory and precluded its general acceptance.