Semiramis (Greek Σεμίραμις) is the legendary queen of Babylon and Assyria whose brick walls Ovid places beside the houses of Pyramus and Thisbe. Greek historians, especially Diodorus drawing on Ctesias, cast her as wife and successor of Ninus, conqueror and builder across Asia; behind the legend stands the historical Assyrian queen Shammuramat, wife of Shamshi-Adad V and regent for Adad-nirari III.
Adapted from Wikipedia, "Semiramis" · CC BY-SA 4.0
I.Historical background
Shammuramat, the Akkadian original of the name, was queen consort of Shamshi-Adad V (ruled 824–811 BC) and likely regent for their son Adad-nirari III. An Assur stele names her queen, mother of the king, and daughter-in-law of Shalmaneser. Successful female rule in a time of political strain may have fed the later Greek legend.
II.Greek legend
Diodorus makes Semiramis daughter of the fish-goddess Derketo of Ascalon, abandoned at birth, fed by doves, and raised by the shepherd Simmas. She marries the general Onnes, advises King Ninus at the siege of Bactra, and becomes Ninus' wife after Onnes' suicide. After Ninus' death she rules for decades, rebuilds Babylon with a vast brick wall, and campaigns as far as India with a trick army of false elephants.
Herodotus credits her with the artificial banks of the Euphrates and knows a Babylonian gate named for her. Hyginus lists among the world's wonders the wall Semiramis, daughter of Dercetis, built of baked brick and bitumen; he also records a strand in which she kills Ninus. Ovid's Pyramus and Thisbe live by the brick walls she built around Babylon.
III.Later tradition
Armenian legend pairs her with Ara the Handsome; medieval Christian writers often cast her as a figure of lust (Dante places her among the lustful). Renaissance and Enlightenment drama and opera — Calderón, Voltaire, Rossini's Semiramide — restored her as a type of female sovereignty. The atlas id semiramis-babylon is this legendary Babylonian/Assyrian queen of the Greek reception, not a separate historical biography of Shammuramat alone.