and her son, with their incestuous male offspring being Tammuz. Hellenistic histories of the Ancient Near East tended to conflate their faint recollections of the deeds of ancient kings into legendary figures who exerted far more power than any ancient king ever did. In Assyria, they invented an eponymous founder of Nineveh named Ninus, who supposedly ruled 52 years over an empire comparable to the Persian Empire at its greatest extent. Ninus' wife Semiramis was in turn a corruption of the historical figure Shammuramat, regent of the Neo-Assyrian Empire from 811 BC. Hislop takes Ninus as a historical figure and associates him with the Biblical figure Nimrod, though he was not the first to do so. The Clementine literature made the association in the 4th Century AD. An influential belief throughout the Middle Ages was that Ninus was the inventor of idolatry, a concept that Hislop clearly drew upon. However, Hislop wrote before the historical records of the ancient near east had been thoroughly decoded and studied, that cast doubt in the decades after he wrote whether there was any such figure as Ninus, and the Greek authors whom he quoted lacked credibility on the subject. The Two Babylons heavily relies on Austen Henry Layard's publications of his excavations at Nineveh, which had only been just discovered in 1851. This gave his work an appearance of being well-researched at the time of its publication. For example, Hislop linked the name of Easter with Astarte, the Phoenician fertility goddess by citing Layard's recent discovery of Astarte's Assyrian name, Ishtar, which Hislop took to be "identical" to Easter. Hislop's claim that Easter is derived from Ishtar is rejected by historical linguists and is an example of folk etymology. Philologists derive the word Easter from Old English Ēostre, the name of a West Germanic goddess. Ēostre derives from the Proto-Germanic goddess name *austrōn-, whose name in turn derives from the Proto-Indo-European deity and personified dawn (from the Proto-Indo-European root *aus-, meaning 'to shine' and thus 'dawn, east'). Other dawn goddesses who developed from *h₂ewsṓs include Latin Aurora, Ancient Greek Eos, and Vedic Sanskrit Ushas. Ishtar, however, is unrelated. Ishtar is a Semitic name of uncertain etymology, possibly taken from the same root as Assyria, or from a semitic word meaning "to irrigate". Hislop ultimately claimed to trace Catholic doctrines back to the worship of Nimrod, asserting that the Catholic Church represented Whore of