nteresting monument of the reign of Binlikhish III is the
statue of Nebo, one of the great gods of Babylon, discovered by Mr.
Loftus and now in the British Museum; the inscription on the base of the
statue mentions the wife of the King, and calls her "the queen
Sammuramat"; this is the only historical Semiramis, the one mentioned by
Herodotus. He places her correctly about a century and a half before
Nitocris, the wife of Nabopolassar, king of Babylon. "Semiramis," says
the father of history, "raised magnificent embankments to restrain the
river (Euphrates), which till then used to overflow and flood the whole
country round Babylon." But why did Herodotus, and the Babylonian
tradition he has so faithfully reported, attribute these useful works to
the queen and not to her husband, Binlikhish? It was once supposed, as a
solution of this problem, that Sammuramat had governed alone for some
time, as queen regnant, after the death of her husband. But this
conjecture is absolutely contradicted by the table of eponymes in the
British Museum, where it can be seen that Sammuramat never reigned
alone. In our opinion the only possible explanation will be found in
regarding Binlikhish and Sammuramat as the Ferdinand and Isabella of
Mesopotamia. The restless desire of Babylonia and Chaldaea to form a
state separate from Assyria grew more decided as time went on; in the
time of Binlikhish it had already gained great strength, and the day was
not far distant when the separation was definitely to take place, and to
occasion the utter ruin of Nineveh. In this position of affairs it was
natural for a king of Assyria to seek to strengthen his authority in
Chaldaea by a marriage with a daughter of the royal line of that country,
who were his vassals, and thus, in the opinion of the people of Babylon,
acquire a legitimate right to the possession of the country by means of
his wife, as well as the advantages to be derived from the attachment of
the people to their own legitimate sovereign. We shall therefore
consider Sammuramat as a Babylonian princess married by Binlikhish, and
as reigning nominally at Babylon while her husband occupied the throne
at Nineveh, and as being the only sovereign registered by the
Babylonians in their national annals. In fact, her position must have
been a peculiar one; she must have been considered the rightful queen
in one part of the empire, to have been named as queen, and in the same
rank as the king, in such