The Forgotten Legend of How Semiramis Built the Egyptian Pyramids

In my reading this week on the myths of Ninus and Semiramis, I encountered an unusual reference in a footnote claiming that there was a Greek story to the effect that the Assyrian queen was believed to be the builder of the Egyptian pyramids. I had never heard this claim before, and it is missing from every book about pyramid legends I could find. The story occurs, as best I can tell, in only three places. In chronological order, these are a papyrus fragment from Egypt dating to around 300 CE, the tenth-century Byzantine Suda, and the eleventh-century Synopsis historion of George Cedrenus. None of the accounts is complete enough by itself to say much about the story, and the papyrus was only published in 2016, and attracted little attention at the time.

​Here is what we know about this lost story.
 
​The papyrus known as P.Oxy. LXXXI 5264, dating from 300 CE +/- 50 years is highly fragmentary, but it contains two references to the pyramids. Y. Trnka-Amrhein translated the fragments:

Fr. 1
‘…and she subjected all Egypt and added it to her existing kingdom. And she built the stone pyramids in Egypt as memorials of her might, and these pyramids are called…’

Fr. 4
‘…the smaller ones of the pyramids and she dedicated them to the gods. For this reason they are called pyramids … quite…’

​The subject of the text is unnamed, but it seems to most likely refer to Semiramis, since the text agrees with the references in the Suda and Cedrenus. The Suda’s story is unfortunately far too brief. The highly condensed account does not even specify where the pyramids she built were supposed to be: “She first put walls around Nineveh and renamed it Babylon. And she placed canals around the rivers and raised the pyramids” (s.v. “Semiramis,” trans. Suda Online).
 
George Cedrenus gives a little more detail, but again, not too much, though he preserves more of the context than the Suda, both obviously working from the same source text:

A man named Chusus, an Ethiopian, was born of the stock of Ham. He begot Nebroth (Nimrod), who is also called Orion, the founder of Babylon; and having thus increased in power, he became the first of men to reign, ruling over the Assyrians. He was also called Kronos, after the name of the planet. He had a wife of the same stock, named Semiramis. She surrounded the rivers with canals and also raised the structures called pyramids. And they also called her Rhea, as she seemed to rule over men with great power and great terror. This Semiramis had a son named Picus, surnamed Zeus, and besides him Belus and Ninus, and a daughter Hera. Ninus, who founded the great Nineveh, had his mother Semiramis as his wife. (p. 28, ed. Bekker; my trans.)

​Early scholars have suggested that this material in the Suda came from John of Antioch because of its near-verbatim similarity to the Picus-Zeus narrative in Chronicle of John Malalas (derived, ultimately and most likely, from Bruttius), one of John of Antioch’s key sources. However, modern scholars feel that it is more likely derived from Ctesias via Nicolaus of Damascus. By contrast, the passage in Cedrenus is mostly derived from Malalas, whose bizarre story of Ninus and Semiramis, unknown to earlier authors, Cedrenus reproduces. Malalas, however, does not mention the pyramids, so that one sentence seems to be imported from the same source as the Suda.
 
Interesting, Nicolaus of Damascus is also suspected as a potential author of the so-called Ninus Romance, a Hellenistic novel about the Assyrian king, which had a twin in the suspected Semiramis Romance, of which only hints survive, but which may be the source of the claim.
 
The source used by the Suda and Cedrenus, whether Nicolaus or someone else, seems a bit confused (the bit about the canals was originally part of the legend of Nitocris, not Semiramis), and it appears to have conflated stories about Babylon in Mesopotamia and the other Babylon, the original name for Old Cairo. Because of this, the few scholars that deigned to mention these passages assumed the pyramid references are either an error or a corruption, possibly conflating the burial mounds Ctesias said Semiramis raised in the original Babylon with pyramids near Egyptian Babylon. According to Manetho, incidentally, Nitocris built the third pyramid of Giza (Eusebius, Chronicle 47; Syncellus, Chronicon p. 64), which might also be a distant source of the confusion.
 
But, to everyone’s surprise, there is now a papyrus fragment that seems to refer to the same story, or a similar one, from what seems to be some lost world history. While this story does not survive, it does have a bit of an echo in later medieval Arabic legends, which speak of Shaddad bin ’Ad, a great king from Arabia who conquered Egypt and built the pyramids as tombs and monuments to his might. Scholars have noted other cases where Greek legends, transmitted through now-lost novels, have ended up in Arabian or Persian mythology, so it may not be entirely a coincidence.
 
I wish there was more we could say about this unusual legend, but not enough survives to give more than a few tantalizing hints.

Weirdly, a version of the legend occurs in the Life of Jesus Christ by the German Catholic mystic and visionary Anne Catherine Emmerich (1774-1824). While some of the story is similar, my gut feeling is that it is a coincidence that she attributed the first pyramid to Semiramis, unless there was a German discussion of the Greek sources I am not aware of in the decades before they were printed and thus reasonably easy to access:

Semiramis was very highly honored in Egypt where, by her intrigues and diabolical arts, she greatly con­tributed to the spread of idolatry. I saw her in Mem­phis, where human sacrifices were common, plotting and practicing magic and astrology. I did not at this period see the bull Apis, but I saw idols with tails and a head like the sun. It was Semiramis who here planned the first pyramid; it was built on the east­ern bank of the Nile, not far from Memphis. The whole nation had to assist at its construction. When it was completed, I saw Semiramis again journeying thither with about two hundred followers. It was for the consecration of the building, Semiramis was hon­ored almost as a divinity.
​
The pyramid happened to be constructed on marshy ground; consequently a foundation of stupendous pil­lars was built for it. It was like an immense broad bridge. The pyramid was raised upon it. One could go around under it, as if into an immense temple formed of columns. It was divided off into innumer­able rooms, dungeons, and spacious halls. The pyra­mid itself up to the very summit also contained numerous apartments, large and small, with open­ings like windows from which I saw flags of cloth hanging and waving. All around the pyramid were baths and gardens. This building was the real cen­ter of Egyptian idolatry, astrology, witchcraft, and abominable impurity. Here children and the aged were offered in sacrifice. Astrologers and necromancers dwelt in the pyramid and there had their diabolical visions. Near the baths was immense machinery for purifying the muddy waters of the Nile. The baths witnessed the most infamous horrors of idol worship. I saw later on Egyptian women practicing the great­est abominations in them. This pyramid did not long exist; it was destroyed.