The Infancy of Semiramis: old coloured lithograph
It takes few efforts of ingenuity to see in the legend of Semiramis a page of mythology. His birth of the Syrian goddess, Derceto, the miraculous adventures of his childhood, his final metamorphosis into a dove, and the cult with which he was honored, is shown to us by God, or one of the mythological characters of the dominant religion on the shores of the Euphrates. Effectively, in her and in the pre-eminent features of her character and her deeds, the heroic form of the great goddess of Babylon is distinguished in an evident way, bringing together the two attributes, opposed in appearance, voluptuous and war, and had the dove as a special symbol, with which it is currently distinguished by all competent men in the field. The name Semiramis seems to be that of a truly historical queen, who flourished in Babylon in the ninth century before Jesus Christ, or many centuries after the time when she placed the legend of the fabulous Semiramis. This Babylonian queen was the wife of the Assyrian King Bin-nirari whose name reads in the epigraph of the base is a statute of the god Nebo, discovered in Nimrud by Loftus, which is currently in the British Museum. The celebrity acquired by this inscription among the astrologers, precisely because of the name it bears of such a queen, and because of the rare and only case so far of supplying a queen named like that of the king in a public monument, deserves to be quoted here eating it whole. It is an exception to the law observed in the East, in which there were only slaves and concubines instead of queens.
Size: 7142px × 9600px
Location: Assyria, Babylon
Photo credit: © FromOldBooks.org / Alamy / Afripics
License: Royalty Free
Model Released: No
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