Ninus

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Ninus was accepted in texts arising in Hellenistic period and later as the eponymous founder of Nineveh, and thus the city itself personified.

He was said to have been the son of Belus or Bel, to have conquered in 17 years the whole of western Asia with the help of Ariaeus, king of Arabia, and to have founded the first empire.

During the siege of Bactra he met Semiramis, the wife of one of his officers, Onnes, whom he took from her husband and married. The fruit of the marriage was Ninyas, i.e. "The Ninevite."

After the death of Ninus, Semiramis, who was accused of causing it, erected to him a temple-tomb, 9 stades high and 10 stades broad, near Babylon, where the story of Pyramus and Thisbe was later based. According to Castor (ap. Syncell. p. 167) his reign lasted 52 years, its commencement falling 2189 BC according to Ctesias.

The story of Ninus and Semiramis is taken up in a different from in a 1st century AD Hellenistic romance called the Ninus Romance, the Novel of Ninus and Semiramis, or the Ninus Fragments.<ref>Daphnis and Chloe. Love Romances and Poetical Fragments. Fragments of the Ninus Romance, Loeb Classical Library ISBN 0674990765</ref> A scene from it is perhaps depicted in mosaics from Antioch on the Orontes<ref>Doro Levi, "The Novel of Ninus and Semiramis" Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society 87:5, Papers on Archaeology, Ecology, Ethnology, History, Paleontology, Physics, and Physiology (May 5, 1944), pp. 420-428</ref>

Another Ninus is described by some authorities as the last king of Nineveh, successor of Sardanapalus.