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The True Story of Semiramis, Legendary Queen of Babylon
The only woman ever to have ruled the mighty Assyrian Empire, Semiramis titillated writers and painters from the Roman period to the 19th century.
Queen Semiramis surveys the building of Babylon, of which she is the legendary founder. Edgar Degas’s mysterious, otherworldly 1861 painting at the Musée d’Orsay, Paris, reveals how the Semiramis myth had lost none of its power.
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