For several decades these and other distinguished scholars endeavored to account for the origin and exploits of Semiramis in a way that would relieve them from the necessity of conceding that she was either an arbitrary creation of Ctesias or, as historians so long taught, an actual Assyrian queen. Insisting that the character of Semiramis is unmistakably that of the Semitic Ishtar or Astarte, some accounted for her historical character by assuming that she was but an eastern myth translated into “the semblance of a history that would be creditable to the Greeks.” Others maintained that she was the daughter of the fish-goddess Derceto, while still others quite as vigorously contended that “the legend of Semiramis originated in Lydia,” whence it found its way to Persia where Persian imagination transformed the daughter of a fish-goddess into a Babylonian queen. Then again it was asserted that the Semiramis legend arose from the commingling of exaggerated accounts of a royal Assyrian lady named Sammurat and certain myths regarding the Assyro-Babylonian Ishtar and the Canaanite Astoreth. To this Semiramis, as to the great Sesostris of Egypt, the Greeks in course of time assigned most of the stupendous works in Asia Minor which were of Hittite or Assyrian origin. Smith, as the result of an exhaustive investigation, comes to the conclusion that “Semiramis is a name and form of Astarte and the story of her conquests in Upper Asia is a translation into the language of political history of the diffusion and victories of her worship in that region.”[398] But while Orientalists were cudgeling their brains in the vain endeavor to solve the problem on which they had wasted so much midnight oil, Dr. Andræ and his associates of the _Deutsche Orient-Gesellschaft_ unexpectedly made their astounding discovery among the ruins of Assur. By a single stroke of the pick they nullified the carefully constructed theories of nearly a half century and proved beyond peradventure that the romantic and mysterious Semiramis was neither an Aramæan goddess, nor the arbitrary creation of a Persian poet, nor the figment of a Greek romancer, but an actual personality who was closely related to some of the best known sovereigns of Assyria. As the wife of Shamsi-Adad V and the mother of Adadinari IV and the daughter-in-law of Salmanassar III, who reigned over Assyria from B.C. 860 to 826, the place of Semiramis in history is henceforth as certain and as fixed as is that of Sargon II or Tiglath-pileser IV, two of the most brilliant monarchs who ever presided over the destinies of the vast empire of Assyria when in the apogee of her power and splendor.