ASMONAE`ANS, a name given to the Maccabees, from Asmon, the place of their origin.

ASO`KA, a king of Behar, in India; after his accession in 264 B.C. became an ardent disciple of Buddha; organised Buddhism, as Constantine did Christianity, into a State religion; convened the third great council of the Church of that creed at Patna; made a proclamation of this faith as far as his influence extended, evidence of which is still extant in pillars and rocks inscribed with his edicts in wide districts of Northern India; d. 223 B.C.

ASP, a poisonous Egyptian viper of uncertain species.

ASPA`SIA, a woman remarkable for her wit, beauty, and culture, a native of Miletus; being attracted to Athens, came and settled in it; became the wife of Pericles, and her home the rendezvous of all the intellectual and wise people of the city, Socrates included; her character was often both justly and unjustly assailed.

AS`PERN, a village in Austria, on the Danube, 4 m.  NE. of Vienna, where a charge of the Austrians under the Archduke Charles was defeated by Napoleon, May 21, 1809, and Marshal Lannes killed.

ASPHALT, a mineral pitch of a black or brownish-black colour, consisting chiefly of carbon; also a limestone impregnated with bitumen, and more or less in every quarter of the globe.

ASPHALTIC LAKE, the DEAD SEA (q. v.), so called from the asphalt on its surface and banks.

AS`PHODEL, a lily plant appraised by the Greeks for its almost perennial flowering, and with which they, in their imagination, covered the Elysian fields, called hence the Asphodel Meadow.

ASPHYX`IA, suspended respiration in the physical life; a term frequently employed by Carlyle to denote a much more recondite, but a no less real, corresponding phenomenon in the spiritual life.

ASPINWALL, a town founded by an American of the name in 1800, at the Atlantic extremity of the Panama railway; named Colon, since the Empress Eugenie presented it with a statue of Columbus.

ASPROMON`TE, a mountain close by Reggio, overlooking the Strait of Messina, near which Garibaldi was defeated and captured in 1862.

ASQUINI, COUNT, a rural economist who did much to promote silk culture in Italy (1726-1818).

ASSAB BAY, a coaling-station belonging to Italy, on the W. coast of the Red Sea.

ASSAM` (5,500), a province E. of Bengal, ceded to Britain after the Burmese war in 1826; being an alluvial plain, with ranges of hills along the Brahmapootra, 450 m. long and 50 broad; the low lands extremely fertile and productive, and the hills covered with tea plantations, yielding at one time, if not still, three-fourths of the tea raised in India.

ASSAROTTI, an Italian philanthropist, born at Genoa; the first to open a school for deaf-mutes in Italy, and devoted zealously his fortune and time to the task (1753-1821).

AS`SAS, NICOLAS, captain of the French regiment of Auvergne, whose celebrity depends on a single act of defiance:  having entered a wood to reconnoitre it the night before the battle of Kloster Kampen, was suddenly surrounded by the enemy’s (the English) soldiers, and defied with bayonets at his breast to utter a cry of alarm; “Ho, Auvergne!” he exclaimed, and fell dead on the instant, pierced with bayonets, to the saving of his countrymen.