[Footnote 5: From Book I of the "History." Translated by Isaac Taylor.
Cyrus, after capturing Babylon, did not destroy it; it was Darius
Hystaspes who razed its walls and towers. Darius Hystaspes was the
father of that Darius who succeeded to the Persian throne after the
failure of male heirs to Cyrus. Xerxes carried further the work of
destruction at Babylon. Its permanent decay was accelerated still more
by the founding, in its neighborhood, of Seleucia in 300 B.C. In the
time of Pliny it had become a dismal and silent place.]
[Footnote 6: Equivalents in English feet for these measurements have
been estimated as eighty-five feet for the width and three hundred and
thirty-five feet for the height.]
[Footnote 7: Now called the Persian Gulf.]
[Footnote 8: Semiramis is regarded by modern antiquarians as a
fabulous personage. By some of them she has been identified with the
goddess Astarte.]
[Footnote 9: Antiquarians have great doubts as to the identity of this
queen. By some she is thought to have been the wife of Nebuchadnezzar,
who began to reign in 604 B.C., and the mother or grandmother of
Belshazzar, the last of the kings of Babylon.]
[Footnote 10: That is, from the sea which encircled Greece.]
[Footnote 11: Herodotus means by this the King of Persia.]
[Footnote 12: Susa was the capital of Susiana, a country lying at the
head of the Persian Gulf.]
[Footnote 13: Here again for Red Sea we must read Persian Gulf.]