To Semiramis is attributed the building of the ancient city of Van on the shores of the beautiful lake of Van, where she made her summer residence until the time of her departure. [12] She might well have lingered there, for the Armenians have a proverb, "Van in this world, paradise in the next." Nevertheless, Semiramis and Ara are mythical characters, although the latter is spoken of in the history of St. Martin as having lived along about 1769 B.C. [13] As regards the popular belief in the legend, however, there is not the slightest doubt. This is proved by the fact that even to-day the city is called "Sham-iram-agerd" by the Armenians, meaning the city of Semiramis. Lynch says that Ara and Semiramis are Tannuz and Istar, the Adonis and the Aphrodite of the Hellenic myth, and that the quest of the Assyrian queen may be connected with the introduction into Armenia of the worship of Istar whose name is mentioned in one of the cuneiform inscriptions at Van. [14] However, the results of modern scholarship are by no means conclusive on this point, as we shall see.
SECTION 3. HISTORICAL BACKGROUND OF THE LEGEND OF ARA AND SEMIRAMIS
Moses' history was read by St. Martin who became exceedingly interested in Van, and in the cuneiform inscriptions spoken of. It was due to him that the French government dispatched a mission to Armenia in 1827, under the direction of a young German Professor, Friedrich Edward Schulz. Schulz was murdered by the Kurds, a thing which rarely happens in Armenia, and his work was left incomplete. He had succeeded, however, in making copies of forty-two inscriptions, which were published in 1840, and proved to be remarkably accurate. Shortly afterward, orientalists made great discoveries in the Mesopotamian valley, but the inscriptions at Van did not tally with any syllabaries discovered up to that time, nor could they be translated in any known language. A number of them were found to be Assyrian, but the great majority were peculiar to Van, and entirely baffled the students. Not until 1880 were they finally unravelled. M. S. Guyard discovered at that time that the concluding phrase of many Vannic texts represented an imprecatory formula found in exactly the same place in Assyrian counterparts. This discovery enabled Professor Sayce, of Oxford, to decipher the inscriptions at a rapid rate.