and the tails of fish appear in Mesopotamian artwork from the Old Babylonian Period onwards, on cylinder seals. These figures are usually mermen (kulullû), but mermaids do occasionally appear. The name for the mermaid figure may have been *kuliltu, meaning "fish-woman". Such figures were used in Neo-Assyrian art as protective figures and were shown in both monumental sculpture and in small, protective figurines. Syrian mermaid goddess A mermaid-like goddess, identified by Greek and Roman writers as Derceto or Atargatis, was worshipped at Ashkelon. In a myth recounted by Diodorus in the 1st century BCE, Derceto gave birth to a child from an affair. Ashamed, she abandoned the child in the desert and drowned herself in a lake, only to be transformed into a human-headed fish. The child, Semiramis, was fed by doves and survived to become a queen. In the 2nd century AD, Lucian described seeing a Phoenician statue of Derceto with the upper body of a woman and the tail of a fish. He noted the contrast with the grand statue located at her Holy City (Hierapolis Bambyce), which appeared entirely human. In the myth, Semiramis's first husband is named Onnes. Some scholars have compared this to the earlier Mesopotamian myth of Oannes, one of the apkallu or seven sages described as fish-men in cuneiform texts. While Oannes was a servant of the water deity Ea, having gained wisdom from the god, English writer Arthur Waugh understood Oannes to be equivalent to Ea, and proposed that surely "Oannes had a fish-tailed wife" and descendants, with Atargatis being one deity thus descended, "through the mists of time". Diodorus's chronology of Queen Semiramis resembles the feats of Alexander the Great (campaigns to India, etc.), and Diodorus may have woven the Macedonian king's material via some unnamed source. There is a mermaid legend attached to Alexander the Great's sister, but this is of post-medieval vintage (see below). Rational attempts at explanation Sometime before 546 BC, Milesian philosopher Anaximander postulated that mankind had sprung from an aquatic animal species, a theory that is sometimes called the Aquatic Ape Theory. He thought that humans, who begin life with prolonged infancy, could not have survived otherwise. There are also naturalist theories on the origins of the mermaid, postulating they derive from sightings of manatees, dugongs or even seals. Still another theory, tangentially related to the aforementioned Aquatic Ape Theory, is that the mermaids of folklore