Sémiramis (in Greek old Σεμίραμις / Semíramis ) is a legendary queen of Babylon whose history is mainly reported to us by Diodore of Sicily and Ctésias.

Biography

It is the girl of Dercéto, a goddess semi-woman semi-fish who lived in a lake close to Ascalon, and of Caÿstros, the supposed son of Achille and Penthésilée. This union is caused by Aphrodite which had to complain about Dercéto. After the birth of Sémiramis, Dercéto assassinates Caÿstros and takes refuge at the bottom of its lake by giving up his/her daughter. She is then raised by Colombe S which fly to the farmers and the shepherds of the area milk and the cheese essential to its food. Discovered by the shepherds intrigued by this horse-gear she is entrusted to their chief who gives him the name of Sémiramis ( which comes from the doves in Syrian language).

Become young woman, she is married by Onnès, an adviser of the king Ninos of Ninive, of which she has two wire, Hyapaté and Hydaspé. She advises her husband in a way so skilful that he succeeds in the totality of his companies. During a forwarding in Bactriane, Onnès makes the error to take along his wife who, taking the head of a group of mountain soldiers, seizes the citadel of Bactres. Ninos falls in love with Sémiramis and constrained Onnès to the suicide. The king marries the beautiful one without difficulty then. It gives him a son Ninyas. Little time after Ninos dies and Sémiramis succeeds to him for a 42 years reign.

It is, according to the legend, the founder of a new city which strikes by its width and its dimensions: Babylon. It creates there, in the palate of occident, the famous hanging gardens. Warlike queen, in that it holds of her paternal grandfather, it seizes says one Arménie, the Médie, all the Asia until the Indus, where it is beaten, and of the Egypt and the Ethiopia. She consults the oracle of Ammon which affirms to him that she would be removed number of alive when his/her Ninyas son would conspire against her. From return after its forwarding in India, she learns that his/her son conspires with the eunuques ones of the palate. Tired it gives the capacity then to him and disappears. The legend claims that it is transformed into dove and is carried with the sky in order to be divinized there.

The veracity of the existence of the character is obviously prone to guarantee but the historians think that the character of Sémiramis was inspired by the queen Sammouramat, quite real character that one, which it was regent of the Assyrie during the minority of his/her son Adad-Nirari III.

Source

• (II, 4 and suiv.).

Works

The character of Sémiramis inspired several authors:

• Crébillon father for his tragedy éponyme (1717);
• Voltaire for his tragedy éponyme (1748);
• Gioacchino Rossini for its opera Semiramide (1823);
• Paul Valéry for his melodrama Sémiramis represented in 1934, with music of Arthur Honegger.

See too

Related article

• Hanging gardens of Sémiramis