Cuth

Cuth (also Cuthah) was a major ancient Mesopotamian city dedicated to the underworld god Nergal, lying about fifteen miles northeast of Babylon at modern Tell Ibrahim in Iraq. After the Assyrian king Sargon II conquered Samaria in 722 BCE and deported the northern Israelite tribes, he repopulated the land with foreign colonists drawn from "Babylon, Cuth, Avva, Hamath, and Sepharvaim" (2 Kings 17:24). The men of Cuth brought their worship of Nergal with them and built him shrines in the high places of the Samaritan towns (2 Kings 17:30). The mixed population that resulted from these forced relocations became the ancestors of the Samaritans — and "Cuthean" became a Jewish slur for Samaritan in later rabbinic writings. The Babylonian Talmud and Josephus both call the Samaritans Kuthim, preserving the memory of this Assyrian-era resettlement.