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These conduits, on which the cultivation of the plateau depends, were established at so remote a date that they were popularly ascribed to the mythic Semiramis, the supposed wife of Ninus. It is thought that in ancient times they were longer and more numerous than at present, when they occur only occasionally, and seldom extend more than a few miles from the base of the hills.
The journey round it occupied three days. The walls were a hundred feet high, broad enough for three chariots abreast, and defended by fifteen hundred towers. The same authority states that the Assyrian king Ninus was the founder, about 2,200 years before the birth of Christ.
The appearance of Ninus is a mixture of the Ghost in Hamlet and the shadow of Darius in Aeschylus. That it is superfluous has been admitted even by the French critics. Lessing, with his raillery, has scared away the Ghost. With a great many faults common to ordinary ghost-scenes, it has this peculiar one, that its speeches are dreadfully bombastic.
It is impossible to take seriously statements which make the tomb of Ninus some 5,500 feet high and 6,100 in diameter. The history of Ninus and Semiramis as Ctesias tells it, is no more than a romantic tale like those of the Shah-Nameh.
“And then what?” she would ask when the tale was done; and the woman would tell her of Ninus and Semiramis, of Sennachereb, of Sardanapalus, Belsarazzur, of Dagon, the fish-god of Philistia, by whom Goliath swore and in whose temple Samson died, or of Sargon, who, placed by his mother in an ark of rushes, was set adrift in the Euphrates, yet, happily discovered by a water-carrier, afterwards became a leader of men.
The plot is a Babylonian version of the story of Agamemnon, telling of the vengeance taken by Arsaces, the son of Ninus and Semiramis, upon his guilty mother, who, with the help of her paramour Assur, had slain her husband.
The scene of the opera is laid in Babylon, and the story briefly told is as follows: Ninus, the King of Babylon, has been murdered by his Queen, Semiramis, aided by Assur, a prince enamoured of her and aspiring to the throne.
These walls were sixty miles in circumference, and guarded by fifteen hundred towers; and in the eighth century before the Christian era the city is estimated to have included a population of more than half a million souls. But many centuries before this, Nineveh was a wonderful city, of which the great monarch Ninus was king, and of which his celebrated wife, Semiramis, was afterwards queen.
The largest of these mounds of bricks and rubbish is 2,110 feet in circumference, and 141 feet in height. Babylon, as is known, was one of the greatest cities of the world. With respect to its founder there are various opinions. Some say Ninus, others Belus, others Semiramis, etc. The city walls are described as having been 150 feet high, and twenty feet thick.
On the right of the throne were Alcseus, son of the hero and of Omphale; Ninus, Belus, Argon, the earlier kings of the dynasty of the Heracleidae, then all the line of intermediate kings, terminating with Ardys, Alyattes, Meles or Myrsus, father of Candaules, and finally Candaules himself.
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