If, therefore, we may regard it as an established fact that our narrative has not arisen out of Assyrian or Babylonian tradition, that the views and additions of Greek origin introduced into it leave the centre untouched; if we have succeeded in discovering, to a tolerably satisfactory degree, the outlines of the narrative of Ctesias, the main question still remains to be answered: from what sources is this narrative to be derived? In the first attempt to criticise this account we find ourselves astonished by the certainty of the statements, the minute and, in part, extremely vivid descriptions of persons and incidents. Not only the great prince who founded the power of Assyria, and the queen whose beauty and courage enchanted him, are known to Ctesias in their words and actions. He can mention by name the man who nurtured Semiramis as a girl, and her first husband. He knows the names of the princes of the Arabs, Medes, Bactrians, and Indians with whom Ninus and Semiramis had to do. The number of the forces set in motion against Bactria and India are given accurately according to the weapon used. The arrangements of the battle beyond the Indus, the progress of the fight, the wounds carried away by Semiramis, the exchange of prisoners, are related with the fidelity of an eye-witness. Weight is obviously laid on the fact that after Semiramis had conquered and traversed Egypt and Ethiopia, after her unbroken success, the last great campaign against the Indians fails because she attacked them without receiving any previous injury. The message which Stabrobates sends to her, the letter which he writes, the reproaches he makes upon her life, the minute details which Ctesias gives of the relation of Onnes to Semiramis, of the conspiracy of the sons by this marriage, who felt themselves dishonoured by the conduct of their now aged mother, of the letter of the Mede, whose fidelity discovered the plot to her, of the speeches which Semiramis made on this occasion, carry us back to a description at once vivid and picturesque. If we take these pictures together with the account of Ctesias about the decline of the Assyrian kingdom, in which also very characteristic details appear, if we consider the style and the whole tone of these accounts of the beginning and the end of the Assyrian kingdom, we cannot avoid the conclusion that Ctesias has either invented the whole narrative or followed a poetic source.