Sammuramat

Assyrian Queen who deposed her husband and constructed the Hanging Gardens of Babylon

In the late ninth and early eighth centuries BCE, Assyrian Queen Sammuramat secured the throne from her husband, Ninus, ordered him killed, and seized control of the expansion of the Assyrian Empire. She fought her way to oceans, thereby accessing foreign trade ports for landlocked Assyria. She conquered Babylon and constructed one of the seven wonders of the world, the Hanging Gardens of Babylon. Sammuramat conquered Ethiopia and Egypt, held Bactria from the Hindu Kush to the Oxus River against her husband’s attack, and repulsed the armies of India. According to chroniclers of the time, Queen Sammuramat led an army of 300,000 foot soldiers, 5,000 horse cavalry, and large contingents of camel-mounted cavalry and charioteers.

Her impressive record of accomplishment and conquest led the Greeks, who called her Semiramis, to fashion tales that she was descended from the gods. Although the most mythologized of the Assyrian rulers, she left records of her accomplishments on stelae and a variety of self-glorifying monuments. On the platform that once held a statue of the great queen, she had written:

“Nature made me a woman yet I have raised myself to rival the greatest men. I swayed the scepter of Ninos; I extended my dominions to the river Hinamemes eastward; to the southward to the land of frankincense and myrrh; northward to Saccae and the Scythians. No Assyrian before me had seen an ocean, but I have seen four. I have built dams and fertilized the barren land with my rivers. I have built impregnable walls and roads to far places and with iron cut passages through mountains where previously even wild animals could not pass. Various as were my deeds, I have yet found leisure to indulge myself with friends.”

There is an abundance of info about Sammuramat on the internet! Here are just a few videos and pages to peruse:

http://www.thathistorynerd.com/2017/10/damn-girl-sammuramat-and-semiramis.html

Despite this article dismissing the whole idea of a powerful Assyrian Queen even existing, it examines how, down through history, the actual deeds of Sammuramat became expanded and ultimately obscured by the myth of Semiramis woven by the Greeks:  https://www.worldhistory.org/article/743/sammu-ramat-and-semiramis-the-inspiration-and-the/