She was the first to rule over the Assyrians; and having held power and killed many people, she discovered the first mines and handed the working of them over to captives. She first put walls around Nineveh and renamed it Babylon.[1] And she placed canals[2] around the rivers and raised the pyramids. And having sailed through [the canals?] towards the ocean, she inquired about those who live near it. They are the Ethiopians. And Homer says, "For Zeus went yesterday to the ocean, among the noble Ethiopians".[3] And they say that some of them are hairless because they have been scorched by the heat of the sun, and they follow an irrational way of life; others, dwelling by the sea, are even ignorant of the foods that grow upon the earth and are satisfied with the eating of fish. And the Garden [sc. of Eden] is there: for all fragrant and costly[4] things are found in those places. They also call Semiramis Rhea. Semiramis told Derketaios: "Go away and in the third year make ready an expedition, beginning from the Hellespont and Libya, as far as Bactria, of three hundred thousand foot soldiers, one hundred thousand cavalry, ten thousand scythed chariots, and the same number of fighting men on camels: twenty thousand other camels for whatever I may need, thirty thousand raw-tanned hides of cows, three long, bronze-beaked ships in Bactria, and a full measure likewise in Syria and Phoenicia and Egypt and Cyprus and Cilicia and the places by the sea as far as the Hellespont." Thereupon she herself, having set out against the Indians, constructed twenty thousand ivory and wooden statues, which the camels would carry, being filled inside with sticks and woodchips, so that they would be easy to bear. The outside of them was covered with leather: and she stationed two riders on each camel to shoot and hurl javelins at the Ethiopians. And she crossed the Indus river, which is one hundred stades wide, and yoked it with a bridge where it seemed to be the narrowest. The length was sixty stades, and the width was three hundred. There were twenty thousand statues. And the same woman turned the river aside ... [5] and within the bed of this river she built palaces on the elevations which had been prepared and smeared with pitch, and then released [the river] again into its bed.[6]