But scholars, while denying that Semiramis was the human personage she was so long believed to be, were unwilling to concede that she was nothing more than a mere arbitrary creation of the fertile imagination of a Greek romancer posing as a historian. The assumption that she was nothing more than a creature of fancy would, in view of her conspicuous position in the ancient world, be more difficult of acceptance than the age-old belief that she was really, as so long considered, the great queen and conqueror of Western Asia. If, then, she was neither a human being nor a mere figment of the imagination, what was she? Scholars, and especially Orientalists, felt the necessity of finding a plausible, if not a satisfactory, answer to this question which became daily more and more insistent. To obtain such an answer they ransacked, as never before, oriental history, mythology, and archæology and with results which, at least to themselves, seemed beyond question. Semiramis [declares an eminent Orientalist] is not a human personage, but a divinity whom legend, as so often happens in similar cases, transports into the domain of human affairs. Diodorus says formally that she was adored as a goddess and declares that her cult had two principal seats, Assyria and the city of Ascalon in Philistia.... That she was, of a truth, a goddess is evinced by her being the daughter of Derceto as well as by the traditions respecting her birth and by her final metamorphosis, which have all a distinctly mythological color.[393] Another distinguished Orientalist is positive that “Semiramis was the name not of a human queen but of the goddess Istar whose legend was nationalized by the Persian historians and their Greek followers.”[394] “The name of Semiramis,” he will have it, “belongs not to Babylonian history but to Greek Romance.”[395] He accentuates this statement when he asserts that Ctesias, the creator of Semiramis, who is only the Greek Aphrodite, based his history in great measure on Persian annals which “like those of Firdusi or of later Arabian writers consisted for the most part of mere legendary tales and rationalized myths,” in which we have to seek “not the history but the mythology of the Babylonians.”[396] Another noted scholar writes a learned paper to prove that “Semiramis is not an historical queen whose legend was enriched in later times with elements borrowed from a religious myth,” but that “she is primarily a goddess, and becomes a quasi-historical queen only by virtues of that euhemerism which in the East is so much older than Euhemerus.”[397]