Semiramis

Semiramis, wife of Ninus, mythical founder of Nineveh according to Ctesias and the Greek historians. A daughter of Derceto the fish-goddess, she was exposed in infancy, but miraculously fed by doves, then brought up by Simmas a shepherd, whose name she took. Onnes, one of the king's generals, charmed by her beauty, married her, but she won the heart of the king himself by her heroic capture of Bactra, whereupon her husband had the loyalty to make away with himself. Ninus soon died, leaving Semiramis to reign gloriously for forty-two years, conquering in Persia, Libya, Ethiopia, unsuccessful in India alone. At the end of this time she left the throne to her son Ninyas and disappeared, thereafter to be worshipped as a divinity. The story is most probably borrowed from some Median epic. The name of the mighty queen survived in place-names, and was familiarly attached to the great works of antiquity, as the hanging gardens of Babylon. Many things in her story, and such points of detail as her personal beauty and her voluptuousness, point to an identification with the great Assyrian goddess Astarte (q.v.). See Lenormant, La Légende de Semiramis (Brussels, 1873).—The Semiramis of the North was a name not inappropriately applied to Catharine II.