At any rate, both tribes of the Cappadocians, both those near the Taurus and those near the Pontus, have to the present time been called "White Syrians,"3 as though some Syrians were black, these being the Syrians who live outside the Taurus; and when I say "Taurus," I am extending the name as far as the Amanus. When those who have written histories of the Syrian empire say that the Medes were overthrown by the Persians and the Syrians by the Medes, they mean by the Syrians no other people than those who built the royal palaces in Babylon and Ninus; and, of these Syrians, Ninus was the man who founded Ninus in Aturia, and his wife, Semiramis, was the woman who succeeded her husband and founded Babylon. These two gained the mastery of Asia; and as for Semiramis, apart from her works at Babylon, many others are also to be seen throughout almost the whole of that continent, I mean the mounds called the Mounds of Semiramis, and walls, and the construction of fortifications with aqueducts therein, and of reservoirs for drinking-water, and of ladder-like ascents of mountains, and of channels in rivers and lakes, and of roads and bridges. And they left to their successors their empire until the time of the empires of Sardanapalus and Arbaces. But later the empire passed over to the Medes.
