[390] See Die Stelenreien in Assur, p. ii (by Walter Andræ, Leipsic, 1913).
[391] “Many other works of Semiramis,” writes Strabo, “besides those of Babylon, are extant in almost every part of this continent, as, for example, earth-works which are called mounds of Semiramis, walls and fortresses, aqueducts and cisterns for water, stair-like roads over mountains, canals communicating with rivers and lakes; roads and bridges.” Geography, Bk. XVI, Chap. II.
[392] Polyænus Strategemeta, VIII, 26.
[393] Cf. La Légende de Semiramis, pp. 22, 23 (by François Lenormant), in Mémoires de l’Academie Royale des Sciences, des Lettres et des Beaux Arts de Belgique, Tom. XL (1873).
[394] A. H. Sayce in Herodotos, with Notes, Introductions and Appendices, p. 105 (London, 1883).
[395] Ibid., p. 303.
[396] Ibid., p. 362.
[397] Mr. Robertson Smith in The English Historical Review, Vol. II, p. 305, April, 1887.
[398] Op. cit., p. 317.
[399] As many fantastic stories are related about Dietrich von Bern—Theodoric the Great, King of the East Goths—as there are about Semiramis. As the Assyrian queen was said to have been nursed by doves in her infancy and to have been transformed into a dove after her death so, the German legends have it, Dietrich von Bern was descended from a spirit and made his exit from the world on a black horse. In Lusatia the mythical Wild Huntsman who, during violent storms, rides furiously across the heavens is called Dietrich von Bern. Living so long after Semiramis it is more surprising that his life should be made the theme of Middle High German poems and Old Norse sagas than that the Assyrian queen should have been made the subject of oriental myth and Greek legend.