attending the shrine at Gerizim. Eli is also held to have created a duplicate of the Ark of the Covenant, which eventually made its way to the Judahite sanctuary in Jerusalem. A Jewish Orthodox tradition, based on material in the Bible, Josephus and the Talmud, dates their presence much later, to the beginning of the Babylonian captivity. In Rabbinic Judaism, for example in the Tosefta Berakhot, the Samaritans are called Cuthites or Cutheans (, Kutim), referring to the ancient city of Kutha, geographically located in what is today Iraq. Josephus in both the Wars of the Jews and the Antiquities of the Jews, in writing of the destruction of the temple on Mt. Gerizim by John Hyrcanus 1, also refers to the Samaritans as the Cuthaeans. In the biblical account, however, Kuthah was one of several cities from which people were brought to Samaria. The Israeli biblical scholar Shemaryahu Talmon has supported the Samaritan tradition that they are mainly descended from the tribes of Ephraim and Manasseh who remained in Israel after the Assyrian conquest. He states that the description of them at 2 Kings 17:24 as foreigners is tendentious and intended to ostracize the Samaritans from those Israelites who returned from the Babylonian exile in 520 BCE. He further states that 2 Chronicles 30:1 could be interpreted as confirming that a large fraction of the tribes of Ephraim and Manasseh (i.e., Samaritans) remained in Israel after the Assyrian exile. Modern genetic studies support the Samaritan narrative that they descend from indigenous Israelites. Shen et al. (2004) formerly speculated that outmarriage with foreign women may have taken place. Most recently the same group came up with genetic evidence that Samaritans are closely linked to Cohanim, and therefore can be traced back to an Israelite population prior to the Assyrian invasion. This correlates with expectations from the fact that the Samaritans retained endogamous and biblical patrilineal marriage customs, and that they remained a genetically isolated population. Samaritan version The Samaritan traditions of their history are contained in the Kitab al-Ta'rikh compiled by Abu'l-Fath in 1355. According to this, a text which Magnar Kartveit identifies as a "fictional" apologia drawn from earlier sources, including Josephus but perhaps also from ancient traditions, a civil war erupted among the Israelites when Eli, son of Yafni, the treasurer of the sons of Israel, sought to usurp the High Priesthood of Israel from the heirs of