Ur-Nammu's ascent to the throne in Ur in 2113 B.C. ushered a period known as 'Ur III'. It was Sumer's most glorious period, and the timeslot in which Monotheism—the belief in one universal creator God—had its roots
It was also Sumer's most tragic period, for before that century was over, Sumer was no more.
* * *
Following Ur-Nammu's tragic death, the throne of Ur was taken over by his son Shulgi. Eager to claim the status of a demigod as that of his father, he asserted in his inscriptions that he was born under divine auspices: The god Nannar himself arranged for the child to be conceived in Enlil's temple in Nippur through a union between Ur-Nammu and Enlil's high priestess, so that "a Little Enlil, a child suitable for kingship and throne, shall be conceived." He got into the habit of calling the goddess Ningal, Nannar's spouse, "my mother" and Utu/Shamash (their son) "my brother." He then asserted in self-laudatory hymns that "a son born of Ninsun am I" (though in another hymn he was her son only by adoption). These different and contradicting versions cast doubt on the validity of his claims to demigodship.
The royal annals indicate that soon after he had ascended the throne, Shulgi launched an expedition to the outlying provinces, including the 'rebel lands'; but his 'weapons' were offers of trade, peace, and his daughters in marriage. His route embraced the two destinations of the still revered Gilgamesh: The Sinai peninsula (where the Spaceport was) in the south and the Landing Place in the north, observing however the sanctity of the Fourth Region by not entering it. On the way, he paused to worship at the "Place of Bright Oracles"—the place we know as Jerusalem. Having thus venerated the three space-related sites, he followed the 'Fertile Crescent'—the arching trade and migration east-west route dictated by geography and water sources—and returned to Sumer.
When Shulgi came back to Ur, he was granted by the gods the title 'High Priest of Anu, Priest of Nannar'. He was befriended by Utu/ Shamash; and then was given the 'personal attention' of Inanna/Ishtar (whose abode has been in Ur since the demise of Naram-Sin). Shulgi's 'Peace Offensive' bore fruit for a while, leading him to turn from affairs of state to become Inanna's lover. In numerous love songs that have been found in the ruins of Ur, he boasted that Inanna "granted me her vulva in her temple."
But as Shulgi neglected affairs of state to indulge in personal pleasures, the unrest in the 'rebel lands' grew again. Unprepared for military action, Shulgi relied on Elamite troops to do the fighting, and started to build a fortified wall to protect Sumer against foreign incursions. It was called the 'Great West Wall', and scholars believe that it ran from the Euphrates to the Tigris Rivers north of where Baghdad is situated nowadays. An unintended result of that was that the heartland of Sumer was cut off from the provinces in the north. In 2048 B.C. the gods, led by Enlil, had enough of Shulgi's state failures and personal dolce vita, and decreed for him "the death of a sinner." Significantly, it was exactly then that, by divine order, Abram left Harran for Canaan . . .
Also in that same year, 2048 B.C., Marduk arrived in Harran, making it his headquarters for the next 24 years. His arrival there, recorded in a well-preserved clay tablet (Fig. 107), posed a new and direct challenge to Enlilite hegemony. Besides the military significance, the move deprived Sumer of its economically vital commercial ties. A shrunken Sumer was now under siege.
Marduk's chess move to establish his command post in Harran enabled Nabu "to marshal his cities, toward the Great Sea to set his course." Individual site names reveal that those places included the all- important Landing Place in Lebanon and the Mission Control city of Shalem (alias Jerusalem). And then came Marduk's claim that the Spaceport Region was no longer neutral—it was to be considered a Marduk and Nabu domain. With Egypt his original dominion, he now controlled all the space-related facilities.
The Enlilites, understandably, could not accept such a situation. Shulgi's successor, his son Amar-Sin, lost no time launching one
military expedition after another, culminating with an ambitious and notable expedition to punish the 'Rebel Lands of the West' (the biblical Canaan). And so it was that in the 7th year of his reign, in 2041 BC., Amar-Sin led a great military alliance against the "sinning cities" in the west (including Sodom and Gomorrah), hoping to regain control of the Spaceport; he was, I have suggested in The Wars of Gods and Men, the 'AmarpheF of Genesis 14.
The clash is recorded in the Bible as the War of the Kings of the East against the Kings of the West. In that first Great International War of antiquity, Abram was a participant: Commanding a cavalry of camel riders called Ish Nar—a literal Hebrew rendering of the Sumerian Lu.nar (= 'Cavalryman')—he successfully prevented the invaders from reaching the Spaceport (map, Fig. 108). He then pursued the retreating invaders all the way to Damascus (nowadays Syria), to rescue his nephew Lot whom they had taken captive in Sodom. The conflict
between the gods was clearly becoming a far-flung multi-nations war.
Amar-Sin died in 2039 B.C.—felled not by an enemy lance but by a scorpion's bite. He was replaced by his brother Shu-Sin; the data for his nine years' reign record two military forays northward but none westward; they speak mostly of his defensive measures. He relied mainly on building new sections of the Wall of the West; the defenses, however, were moved each time ever closer to Sumer's heartland, and the territory controlled from Ur kept shrinking.
By the time the next (and last) 'Ur III' king, Ibbi-Sin, ascended the throne in 2029 B.C., invaders from the west broke through the defensive Wall and were clashing with Ur's 'Foreign Legion', Elamite troops, in Sumerian territory. Directing and prompting the Westerners was Nabu. His divine father, Marduk himself, was waiting in Harran for the recapture of Babylon.
To the old reasons for seeking Supremacy (starting with his father Enki having been deprived of the succession rights), Marduk now added a 'Celestial' argument, claiming that his time for Supremacy had come because Enlil's zodiacal Age of the Bull ('Taurus') was ending, and his era, the Age of the Ram ('Aries'), was dawning. Ironically, it was his own two brothers who pointed out that astronomically observed, the zodiacal constellation of the Ram had not yet begun: Ningishzidda said so from the observatory in Lagash, and Nergal from the scientific station in the Lower World. But his brothers' findings only angered Marduk and intensified Nabu's recruiting of fighters for Marduk.
Frustrated and desperate, Enlil convened the great gods to an emergency assembly; it approved extraordinary steps that changed the future forever.
* * *
Amazingly, various written records from antiquity have survived, providing us not just with an outline of events but with great details about the battles, the strategies, the discussions, the arguments, the participants and their moves, and the crucial decisions that resulted in the most profound upheaval on Earth since the Deluge.
Augmented by the Date Formulas and varied other references, the principal sources for reconstructing those dramatic events are the relevant chapters in Genesis; Marduk's statements in a text known as The Marduk Prophecy; a group of tablets in the 'Spartoli Collection' in the British Museum known as The Khedorla'omer Texts; and a long historical/autobiographical text dictated by the god Nergal to a trusted scribe, a text known as the Erra Epos. As in a movie—usually a crime thriller—in which the various eye witnesses and principals describe the same event not exactly the same way, but from which the real story emerges, so are we able to retrieve the actual facts in this case.
Marduk, we learn from those sources, did not personally attend the emergency council summoned by Enlil, but sent to them an appeal in which he repeatedly asked: "Until when?" The year, 2024 B.C., marked the 72nd anniversary of his life on the run—the time it takes the zodiacal circle to move one degree. It was 24 years since he had been waiting in Harran; and he asked: "Until When? When will my days of wandering be completed?"
Called to make the Enlilite case, Ninurta blamed everything on Marduk, even accusing his followers of defiling Enlil's temple in Nippur. Nannar/Sin's accusations were mainly ag
ainst Nabu. Nabu was summoned, and "Before the gods the son of his father came." Speaking for his father, he blamed Ninurta; voicing accusations against Nergal, he got into a shouting match with Nergal (who was present); and "showing disrespect, to Enlil evil he spoke," accusing the Lord of the Command of injustice and of condoning destruction. Enki spoke up: "What are Marduk and Nabu actually accused oft" he asked. His ire was directed especially at his son Nergal: "Why do you continue the opposition?" he asked him. The two argued so much that in the end Enki shouted to Nergal to get out of his presence.
It was then that Nergal—vilified by Marduk and Nabu, ordered out by his father, Enki—"consulting with himself," concocted the idea of resort to the "Awesome Weapons."
He did not know where they were hidden, but knew that they existed on Earth, locked away in a secret underground place (according to a text catalogued as CT-xvi lines 44-46) somewhere in Africa, in the domain of his brother Gibil. Based on our current level of technology, they can be described as seven nuclear devices: "Clad with terror, with a brilliance they rush forth." They were brought to Earth unintentionally from Nibiru by the fleeing Alalu, and were hidden away in a secret safe place a long time ago; Enki knew where; so did Enlil.
Meeting again as a War Council, the gods, overruling Enki, voted to follow Nergal's suggestion to give Marduk a punishing blow. There was constant communication with Anu: "Anu to Earth the words was speaking, Earth to Anu the words pronounced." He made clear that his approval for the unprecedented step of using the "Awesome Weapons" was limited to depriving Marduk of the Sinai Spaceport, but that neither gods nor people should be harmed: "Anu, lord of the gods, on the Earth had pity," the ancient records state. Choosing Nergal and Ninurta to carry out the mission, the gods made absolutely clear to them its limited and conditional scope.
In 2024 B.C. Ninurta (called in the epic Ishum, 'The Scorcher') and Nergal (called in the epic Erra, 'The Annihilator') unleashed nuclear weapons that obliterated the Spaceport and the adjoining "sinning cities" in the plain south of the Dead Sea.
Abraham, according to the Bible, who was then encamped in the mountains overlooking the Dead Sea, was visited earlier that day by three Malachim (translated 'angels' but literally meaning 'emissaries') and was forewarned by their leader of what was about to happen. The other two went ahead to Sodom, where Abraham's nephew Lot dwelt. That night, we know from the Erra Epos, Ishum/Ninurta "to the Mount Most Supreme set his course" in his Divine Black Bird. Arriving there,
He raised his hand (and)
the mount was smashed.
The plain by the Mount Most Supreme
he then obliterated;
in its forests not a tree stem was left standing.
With two pinpointed nuclear drops, the Spaceport was obliterated by Ninurta—first the 'Mount Most Supreme' ('Mount Mashu' of the Gilgamesh Epic) with its inner tunnels and hidden facilities; then the adjoining plain that served for landing and takeoff. The scar in the Sinai Peninsula is still visible to this day, as a NASA photograph from space shows (Fig. 109); the plain—amid white limestone mountains— is still covered with crushed and thoroughly burned and blackened rocks.
Figure 109
The obliteration of the "sinning cities" was a muddled affair. According to the Sumerian texts, Ninurta tried to dissuade Nergal from carrying it out. According to the Bible, it was Abraham who pleaded with one of the three Angels who had dropped-in on him to spare the cities if as few as ten "righteous ones" shall be found in Sodom. That evening, in Sodom, two Angels sent to verify whether the cities should be spared were mobbed by a crowd seeking to sodomize them. "Upheavaling" was inevitable; but they agreed to delay it in order to give Lot (Abraham's nephew) and his family enough time to escape to the mountains. Then at dawn,
Erra, emulating Ishum,
the cities he finished off,
to desolation he upheavaled them.
Sodom and Gomorrah and three other cities in "the disobedient land, he obliterated." The Bible, in virtually identical words, relates that "as the sun was risen over the Earth, from the skies were those cities upheavaled, with brimstones and fire that have come from Yahweh."
And Abraham got up early in the morning,
and went to where he had stood with the Lord,
and gazed toward Sodom and Gomorrah,
in the direction of the place of the Plain;
and lo and behold—
there was steaming smoke rising from the ground
like the steaming smoke of a furnace.
Genesis 19:27-28
That is how it was, the Bible states, "when the Elohim annihilated the Cities of the Plain." Five nuclear devices, dropped by 'The Annihilator' Nergal, did it.
And then the Law of Unintended Consequences proved itself true on a catastrophic scale; for an unexpected consequence of the nuclear holocaust was the death of Sumer itself: A poisonous nuclear cloud, driven eastward by unexpected winds, overwhelmed all life in Sumer (Fig. 110).
------------------------------- ♦-------------------------
THE "EVIL WIND"
"A storm, the Evil Wind, went around in the skies, causing cities to become desolate, causing houses to become desolate, the sheepfolds to be emptied, causing Sumer's waters to be bitter, its cultivated fields grow weeds"—so did text after text from that time describe what had happened.
"On the land Sumer fell a calamity, one unknown to man, one that had never been seen before, one which could not be withstood," the texts say. An "unseen death roamed the streets, it let loose in the road . . . No one can see it when it enters the house . . . There is no defense against this evil which assails like a ghost; the highest wall, the thickest wall, it passes as a flood . . . through the door like a snake it glides, like a wind through the hinge it blows in . . . Those who hid behind doors were felled inside, those who ran to the rooftops died on the rooftops." It was a terrible, gruesome death: Wherever the Evil Wind reached, "the people, terrified, could not breathe . . . mouths were drenched in blood, heads wallowed in blood, the face was made pale by the Evil Wind."
It was not a natural calamity: "It was a great storm decreed from Anu, it had come from the heart of Enlil." It was the result of * an explosion: "An evil blast the forerunner of the baleful storm was."
It was triggered by nuclear devices—"caused by seven awesome weapons in a lightning flash"; and it came from the Plain of the Dead Sea: "from the Plain Of No Pity it had come."
Forewarned of the Evil Wind's direction, the gods fled Sumer in panic. Long Lamentation Texts, such as Lamentation Over The Destruction of Sumer and Ur, list the cities and the temples that were "abandoned to the Wind" and describe the haste, panic, and grief as each deity fled, unable to help the people. ("From my temple like a bird I was made to flee," Inanna lamented.) Behind them temples, houses, animal stalls, all buildings remained standing; but everything alive—people, animals, vegetation—died. Texts written even centuries recalled that day, when a cloud of radioactive dust reached Sumer, “The Day when the skies were crushed and the Earth was smitten, its face obliterated by the maelstrom.”
“Ur has become a strange city, its temple has become a Temple of Tears,” wrote a weeping Ningal in A Lamentation Over the Destruction of Ur; "Ur and its people were given over to the Wind."
XV
Buried in Grandeur
Four thousand years after the nuclear calamity, in A.D. 1922, a British archaeologist named Leonard Woolley came to Iraq to dig up ancient Mesopotamia. Attracted by the imposing remains of a ziggurat that stood out in the desert plain (Fig. Ill), he chose to start excavating at the adjoining site locally called Tell el-Muqayyar. As ancient walls, artifacts, and inscribed clay tablets were unearthed, he realized that he was digging up ancient Ur—Ur of the Chaldees.
His efforts, lasting twelve years, were carried out as a Joint Expedition of the British Museum in London and the University of Pennsylvania Museum in Philadelphia. Some of those institutions' most dramatic exhibits consist of objects, a
rtifacts, and sculptures found by Sir Leonard Woolley in Ur. But what he had found may well transcend Anything that has ever been put on display.
As the arduous task of removing layers of soil that desert sands, the elements, and time accumulated over the ruins progressed, the contours of the ancient city started to emerge—here were the walls, there were the harbor and canals, the residential quarters, the palace, and the Tummal—the artificially raised area of the sacred precinct. Digging at its edge, Woolley made the find of the century: A cemetery, thousands of years old, that included unique 'royal' tombs.
The excavations in the residential sections of the city established that Ur's inhabitants followed the Sumerian custom of burying their dead right under the floors of their dwellings, where families con-
Figure 111
tinued to live. It was thus highly unusual to find a cemetery, with as many as 1,800 graves in it. They were concentrated within the area of the sacred precinct and ranged in age from pre-dynastic times (before Kingship began) through Seleucid times. There were burials on top of burials, intrusions of graves into others, even instances of apparent reinterments in the same graves. In some instances, Wool ley's workers dug huge trenches going down almost fifty feet, to cut through the layers 4 and better date graves.
Most were hollows in the ground, where the bodies were placed . lying on their backs. Woolley assumed that these different 'inhumations' were accorded on the basis of some social or religious status. But then, in the southeastern edge of the sacred precinct—within the walled area—Woolley discovered a group of entirely different burials, some 660 of them. In them, with sixteen exceptions, the bodies were wrapped in reed matting as a kind of a shroud, or placed in wooden coffins—an even greater distinction, for wood was in short supply and quite expensive in Sumer. Each one of those dead persons was then laid to rest at the bottom of a deep rectangular pit, large enough to hold them. The people thus buried, both male and female, were invariably placed on their sides—not on their backs as in the common burials; their arms and hands were flexed in front of their chests, their legs were slightly bent (Fig. 112). Laid out beside the bodies or on them were various personal belongings—jewelry, a cylinder seal, a cup or bowl; these objects enabled dating these graves to the Early Dynastic Period, roughly from circa 2650 B.C. to 2350 B.C.; it was the period in which central kingship was in Ur, starting with Ur's First Dynasty ("Ur I"), when Kingship was transferred thereto from Uruk.
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