The Library Kids : Queen Semiramis

Friday, May 23, 2014

Queen Semiramis

Semiramis depicted as an armed Amazon in this eighteenth-century Italian illustration.

Queen Semiramis was an Assyrian Queen married to King Ninus. When he died, she took over and empowered the Assyrian empire. She led military campaigns across Asia and even into India. Knowing that she did not have an advantage over the Indian elephants, she created a ruse to dress her camels up like elephants and fool the Indians. She is also the inventor of the Burka. Semiramis was not Isis. She came much later. She was succeeded by her son. Here is what Diodorus Siculus wrote about her.

Semiramis founded other cities also along the Euphrates and Tigris rivers, in which she established trading-places for the merchants who brought goods from Media, Paratacene, and all the nighbouring region. (Diodorus Siculus Library of History Volume 1, page 387).

Diodorus goes on to say that she built temples to Zeus, Hera, and Rhea:

Now the entire building was ingeniously constructed at great expense of bitumen and brick, and at the top of the ascent Semiramis set up three statues of hammered gold, of Zeus, Hera, and Rhea. (Diodorus Siculus, Library of History, Volume 1, page 382-383).

Observing that she was greatly inferior because of their lack of elephants, Semiramis conceived the plan of making dummies like these animals, in the hope that the Indians would be struck with terror because of their belief that no elephants ever existed at all apart from those found in India. (Diodorus Siculus, Library of History, Volume 1, page 403).

First of all, then, since she was about to set out upon a journey of many days, she devised a garb which made it impossible to distinguish whether the wearer of it was a man or a woman. This dress was well adapted to her needs, as regards both her travelling in the heat, for protecting the colour of her skin, and her convenience in doing whatever she might wish to do, since it was quite pliable and suitable to a young person, and, in a word, was so attractive that in later times the Medes, who were then dominant in Asia, always wore the garb of Semiramis. (Diodorus Siculus, Library of History, Volume 1, page 367).