of Oannes, governor of Syria.  Ninos, amazed at the courage displayed by her on more than one occasion, carried her off, made her his favourite wife, and finally met his death at her hands.  No sooner did she become queen, than she founded Babylon on a far more extensive scale than that of Nineveh.  Its walls were three hundred and sixty stadia in length, with two hundred and fifty lofty towers, placed here and there on its circuit, the roadway round the top of the ramparts being wide enough for six chariots to drive abreast.  She made a kind of harbour in the Euphrates, threw a bridge across it, and built quays one hundred and sixty stadia in length along its course; in the midst of the town she raised a temple to Bel.  This great work was scarcely finished when disturbances broke out in Media; these she promptly repressed, and set out on a tour of inspection through the whole of her provinces, with a view to preventing the recurrence of similar outbreaks by her presence.  Wherever she went she left records of her passage behind her, cutting her way through mountains, quarrying a pathway through the solid rock, making broad highways for herself, bringing rebellious tribes beneath her yoke, and raising tumuli to mark the tombs of such of her satraps as fell beneath the blows of the enemy.  She built Ecbatana in Media, Semiramocarta on Lake Van in Armenia, and Tarsus in Cilicia; then, having reached the confines of Syria, she crossed the isthmus, and conquered Egypt and Ethiopia.  The far-famed wealth of India recalled her from the banks of the Nile to those of the Euphrates, en route for the remote east, but at this point her good fortune forsook her:  she was defeated by King Stratobates, and returned to her own dominions, never again to leave them.  She had set up triumphal stelae on the boundaries of the habitable globe, in the very midst of Scythia, not far from the Iaxartes, where, centuries afterwards, Alexander of Macedon read the panegyric of herself which she had caused to be engraved there.  “Nature,” she writes, “gave me the body of a woman, but my deeds have put me on a level with the greatest of men.  I ruled over the dominion of Ninos, which extends eastwards to the river Hinaman, southwards to the countries of Incense and Myrrh, and northwards as far as the Sacaa and Sogdiani.  Before my time no Assyrian had ever set eyes on the sea:  I have seen four oceans to which no mariner has ever sailed, so far remote are they.  I have made rivers to flow where I would have them, in the places where they were needed; thus did I render fertile the barren soil by watering it with my rivers.  I raised up impregnable fortresses, and cut roadways through the solid rock with the pick.  I opened a way for the wheels of my chariots in places to which even the feet of wild beasts had never penetrated.  And, amidst all these labours, I yet found time for my pleasures and for the society of my friends.”  On discovering that her son Ninyas was plotting her