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When the Age of the Ram finally arrived, it did not come as the dawn of a New Age. Rather, it was accompanied by darkness at noon - the darkness of a cloud of deadly radiation from the first-ever explosion of nuclear weapons on Earth. It came as the culmination of more than two centuries of upheavals and warfare that pitted God against God and nation against nation; and in its aftermath, the great Sumerian civilization that had lasted for nearly two millennia lay prostrate and desolate, its people decimated, its remnants dispersed in the world's first Diaspora.
Marduk did indeed gain supremacy; but the New Order that ensued was one of new laws and customs, a new religion and beliefs; an era of regression in sciences, of astrology instead of astronomy - even of a new and lesser status for women.
Let us review the record of that first known changeover; perchance we may find full answers, for sure enlightening clues. It was, by our calculations, circa 2295 BC. that Marduk left Babylon, going first to the Land of Mines and then to regions unspecilied by the Mesopotamian texts. He left on the understanding that the instruments and other "works of wonder" that he had put up in Babylon would remain un disturbed; but no sooner did Marduk leave, than Nergal/ Erra broke his promise.
Out of mere curiosity, or perhaps with malice in mind, he entered the forbidden Gigunu, the mysterious chamber that Marduk had declared off limits. Once inside he caused the chamber's "brilliance" to be removed; thereupon, as Marduk had warned, "the day turned into darkness," and calamities started afflicting Babylon and its people. Was the "brilliance" a radiating, nuclear-driven device? It is not clear what it was, except that the adverse effects began to spread throughout Mesopotamia.
The other Gods were angered by Nergal's deed; even his father Enki reprimanded him and ordered him back to his African domain, Kutha. Nergal heeded the order; but before leaving he smashed all that Marduk had set up, and left behind his warriors to make sure that Marduk's followers in Babylon would remain subdued. The two departures, first of Marduk and then of Nergal, left the arena free for the descendants of Enlil.
First to take advantage of the situation was Inanna (Ishtar); she chose a grandson of Sargon, Naram-Sin ("Sin's Favorite") to ascend the throne of Sumer and Akkad; and with him and his armies as her surrogates, she embarked on a series of con-quests. Among her first targets was the great Landing Place in the Cedar Mountains, the immense platform of Baalbek in Lebanon. She then assaulted the lands along the Mediterranean coast, seizing Mission Control Center in Jerusalem and the crossing point on the land route from Mesopotamia to the Sinai, Jericho.
Now the spaceport itself, in the Sinai peninsula, was under her control. But, unsatisfied, Inanna sought to fulfill her dream of dominating Egypt - a dream shattered by the death of Dumuzi. Guiding, urging, and arming Naram-Sin with her ''awesome weapons,'' she brought about the invasion of Egypt. The texts suggest that recognizing her as an avowed adversary of Marduk, Nergal gave her his actual or tacit assistance in that invasion.
But the other leaders of the Anunnaki did not view it all with equanimity. Not only did she breach the Enlilite-Enki'ite regional boundaries, she also brought under her control the spaceport, that neutral sacred zone in the Fourth Region. An Assembly of the Gods was convened in Nippur to deal with Inanna's excesses. As a result, an order for her arrest and trial was issued by Enlil. Hearing that, Inanna forsook her temple in Agade, Naram-Sin's capital, and escaped to hide with Nergal. From afar, she sent orders and oracles to Naram-Sin, encouraging him to continue the conquests and bloodshed.
To counteract that, the other Gods empowered Ninurta to bring over loyal troops from neighboring mountainous lands. A text titled The Curse of Agade describes those events and the vow of the Anunnaki to obliterate Agade. True to that vow, the city - once the pride of Sargon and the dynasty of Akkad - was never to be found again. The relatively brief Era of Ishtar had come to an end; and to bring some measure of order and stability to Mesopotamia and its neighboring lands, Ninurta (under whom Kingship had started in Sumer) was again given command of the country.
Before Agade was destroyed, Ninurta its "crownband of lordship, the tiara of kingship, the throne given to rulership, to his temple brought over." At that time his "cult center" was in Lagash, at its Girsu sacred precinct. From there, flying in his Divine Black Bird, Ninurta roamed the plain between the two rivers and the adjoining moun-tainlands, restoring irrigation and agriculture, returning or-der and tranquility.
Setting personal examples by his unwavering fidelity to his spouse Bau (nicknamed Gula, "the Great") with whom he had portraits made (Fig. 154), and devoted to his mother Ninharsag, he proclaimed moral laws and codes of justice. To assist in these tasks he appointed human viceroys; circa 2160 BC, Gudea was the chosen one. Over in Egypt, in the aftermath of the exile of Marduky Ra, Naram-Sin's invasion and the reprimand to Nergal, the country was in disarray. Egyptologists call the chaotic century, between about 2180 and 2040 BC, the "First Intermediate Period" in Egyptian history.
Fig. 154
It was a time when the Old Kingdom that was centered in Memphis and Heliopolis came under attack from Theban princes in the south. Political, religious, and calendrical issues were involved; underlying the human contest was the celestial confrontation between the Bull and the Ram. From the very beginning of Egyptian dynastic rule and religion, the greatest celestial compliment to the great Gods was to compare them to the Bull of Heaven.
Its earthly symbol, the Sacred Bull Apis (Fig. 155a) was venerated at Heliopolis and Memphis. Some of the earliest pictographic inscriptions - so old that Sir Flinders Petrie (Royal Tombs) attributed them to the time of "dynasty zero" - showed this symbol of the Sacred Bull upon a Celestial Boat with a priest holding ritual objects in front of it (Fig. 155b).
Figures 155a and 155b
(The depictions on this archaic plaque and on another similar one also reported by Sir Flinders Petrie, also clearly show the Sphinx, indicating beyond doubt that the Sphinx had already existed many centuries before its supposed construction by the Pharaoh Khephren of the Fourth Dynasty.)
As later in Crete for the
Minotaur, a special labyrinth was built for the Apis Bull in
Memphis. At Saqqara, effigies of bull-heads made of clay with
natural horns were placed in recesses within the tomb of a Second
Dynasty pharaoh; and it is known that Zoser, a Third Dynasty
pharaoh, held special ceremonies in honor of the Bull of Heaven at
his spacious pyramid compound in Saqqara. All that had taken place
during the Old Kingdom, a period that came to an end circa 2180 BC.
Figures 156a and 156b
The Ram began to dominate celestial and monumental art and Ra was given the epithet "Ram of the Four Winds," and was so depicted to indicate that he was master of the four corners and four regions of the Earth (Fig. 157). Where was Thoth during that First Intermediate Period, when in the heavens above and on Earth below the Ram and its followers were battling and chasing away the Bull and its adherents?
Figure 157
There is no indication that he sought to reclaim the rulership of a divided and chaotic Egypt. It was a time when, without giving up his new domains in the New World, he could go about that in which he had become proficient - the erection of circular observatories and the teaching of the local inhabitants at old and new places the "secrets of numbers" and the knowledge of the calendar.
The reconstruction of Stonehenge I into
Stonehenge II and III at about that very time was one of those
monumental edifices. If legends be deemed as conveyors of historical
fact, then the one about Africans coming to erect the megalithic
circles at Stonehenge suggests that Thoth, alias Quetzalcoatl, had
brought over for the reconstruction task some of his Olmec followers
who by then had become expert stonemasons in Mesoamerica.
That the temple be built the way its divine planners had ordained and at the specific time it was to be built and inaugurated, she determined, was all "part of a plan foreordained when the fates were decided; Gudea's commission was part of a cosmic plan." This, she concluded, was '"the kind of setting where not only art and ritual but also mythology go hand in hand as essentials in the religion."
Circa 2200 BC. was indeed a time "when in Heaven and on Earth the fates were decided," for it was the time when a New Age, the Age of the Ram, was due to replace the Old Age, the Age of the Bull. Though Marduk/Ra was somewhere in exile, there grew a contest for the hearts and minds of people since the "Gods" had come to depend increasingly on human kings and human armies to achieve their ends.
Many sources indicate that Marduk's son Nabu was crisscrossing the lands that later became known as Lands of the Bible, seeking adherents to his father's side. His name. Nabu, had the same meaning and came from the same verb by which the Bible called a true prophet: Nabi, one who receives the divine words and signs and in turn expresses them to the people. The divine signs of which Nabu spoke were the changing Heavens; the fact that the New Year and other worship dates no longer seemed to occur when they should have.
Nabu's weapon, in behalf of Marduk, was the calendar... What, one may ask, was there to view or determine that was unclear or in dispute? The truth of the matter is that even nowadays, no one can say for sure when one "Age" The Age of the Ram 325 has ended and the other begun. There could be the arbitrary, mathematically precise calculation that since the Grand Precessional Cycle of 25,920 years is divided into twelve Houses, each House or Age lasts exactly 2,160 years. That was the mathematical basis of the sexagesimal system, the 10:6 ratio between Divine Time and Celestial Time.
But if no person alive, no astronomer-priest, had witnessed the beginning of an Age and its ending, for no one human stayed alive 2,160 years, it was either the word of the Gods, or the observation of the skies. But the zodiacal constellations are of varied sizes, and the Sun can linger longer or shorter periods within them.
The problem is especially acute in the case of Aries, that occupies less than 30° of the celestial arc, while its neighbors Taurus and Pisces extend beyond their official 30° Houses. So, if the Gods disagreed, some of them (e.g. Marduk, so well trained in sciences by his father Enki, and Nabu) could say: 2,160 years have passed, the Time has come. But others (e.g. Ninurta, Thoth) could and did say: But look to the Heavens, do you really see the change occurring?
The historical record, as detailed by the ancient texts and affirmed by archaeology, indicates that the tactics worked- - at least for a while. Marduk remained in exile and in Mesopotamia the situation calmed down sufficiently for the mountainland troops to be sent back. After serving as a military headquarters for "ninety-one years and forty days" (according to the ancient records), Lagash could become a civilian center for the glorification of Ninurta.
Circa 2160 BC. that was expressed by the construction of the new Eninnu under Gudea's reign. The Era of Ninurta lasted about a century and a half. Then, satisfied that the situation was under control, Ninurta departed for some distant mission. In his stead Enlil appointed his son Nannar/Sin to oversee Sumer and Akkad, and Ur, Nannar/Sin's "cult center," became the capital of a revitalized empire. It was an appointment with more than political and hierarchical implications, for Nannar/Sin was the "Moon God" and his elevation to supremacy announced that the purely solar calendar of Ra/Marduk was done with and that the lunisolar calendar of Nippur was the only true one - religiously and politically.
To assure adherence, a high priest knowledgeable in astronomy and celestial omens was sent from Nippur's temple to liaison at Ur. His name was Terah; with him was his ten-year-old son, Abram. The year, by our calculations, was 2113 BC. The arrival of Terah and his family in Ur coincided with the establishment of the reign of five successive rulers known as the Ur III dynasty.
Their, and Abram's, ensuing century saw on the one hand the glorious culmination of the Sumerian civilization; its epitome and hallmark was the grand ziggurat built there for Nannar/Sin - a monumental edifice that, though lying in ruins for almost four thousand years, still dominates the landscape and awes the viewer by its immensity, stability, and intricacy. Under the active guidance of Nannar and his spouse Ningal, Sumer attained new heights in art and sciences, literature and urban organization, agriculture and industry and commerce.
Sumer became the granary of the Lands of the Bible, its wool and garment industries were in a class by themselves, its merchants were the famed Merchants of Ur. But that was only one aspect of the Era of Nannar. On the other hand, hanging over all this greatness and glory was the destiny ordained by Time - the relentless change, from one New Year to another, of the Sun's position less and less in the House of GUD.ANNA, the "Bull of Heaven," and ever closer to that of KU.MAL, the celestial Ram - with all the dire consequences.
Ever since it was given Priesthood and Kingship, Mankind had known its place and role. The "Gods" were the Lords, to be worshiped and venerated. There was a defined hierarchy, prescribed rituals, and holy days. The Gods were strict but benevolent, their decrees were sharp but righteous. For millennia the Gods oversaw the welfare and fate of Mankind, all the while remaining clearly apart from the people, approachable only by the high priest on specified dates, communicating with the king in visions and by omens.
But now all that was beginning to crumble, for the Gods themselves were at odds, citing different celestial omens and a changing calendar, increasingly pitting nation against nation in the cause of "divine" wars, quarrels, and bloodshed. And Mankind, confused and bewildered, increasingly speaking of "my God" and "your God," now even began to doubt the divine credibility. In such circumstances Enlil and Nannar chose carefully the first ruler of the new dynasty.
They selected Ur-Nammu ("The Joy of Ur"), a demiGod whose mother was the Goddess Ninsun. It was undoubtedly a very calculated move meant to evoke among the people memories of past glories and the "good old days," for Ninsun was the mother of the famed Gilgamesh who was still exalted in epic tales and artistic depictions. He was a king of Erech who was privileged to have seen both the Landing Place in the Cedar Mountains of Lebanon and the spaceport in the Sinai; and the choice of another son of Ninsun, some seven centuries later, was meant to evoke confidences that those vital places would again be part of Sumer's heritage, its Promised Lands.
Ur-Nammu's assignment was to steer the people "away from the evil ways" of following the wrong Gods. The effort was marked by the repair and rebuilding of all the major temples in the land - with the conspicuous exception of Marduk's temple in Babylon. The next step was to subdue the "evil cities" where Nabu was making converts to Marduk. To that end Enlil provided Ur-Nammu with a "Divine Weapon" with which to "in the hostile lands heap up the rebels in piles."
That the enforcement of the Enlilite Celestial Time was a major purpose is made clear in the text that quotes Enlil's instructions to Ur-Nammu about the weapon's use:
The Bull of the equinox and the Lion of the solstice were to be upheld; any opponent of the Lofty Ones had to be hunted down, crushed, destroyed. Leading the called-for military expedition, Ur-Nammu met not victory but an ignominious end. In the course of the battle his chariot got stuck in the mud and he fell off it, only to be crushed to death by its own wheels.
The tragedy was compounded when the boat returning his body to Sumer sank on the way, so that the great king was not even brought to burial. When the news reached Ur, the people were grieved and disbelieving. How did it happen that "the Lord Nannar did not hold Ur-Nammu by the hand," why did Inanna "not put her noble arm around his head," why did Utu not assist him? Why did Anu "alter his holy word"? Surely it was a betrayal by the great Gods; it could only happen because "Enlil deceitfully changed his fate-decree."
The tragic death of Ur-Nammu and the doubting of the Enlilite Gods at Ur caused Terah and his family to move to Harran, a city in northwestern Mesopotamia that served as a link with the lands and people of Anatolia - the Hittites; evidently, the powers that be felt that Harran, where a temple to Nannar/Sin almost duplicated that of Ur, would be a more appropriate place for the Nippurian scion of a priestly royal line in the turbulent times ahead.
In Ur, Shulgi, a son of Ur-Nammu by a priestess in a marriage arranged by Nannar, ascended the throne. He at once sought the favor of Ninurta, building for him a shrine in Nippur. The move had practical aspects; for as the western provinces became ever more restive in spite of a peace-journey undertaken by Shulgi, he arranged to obtain a "foreign legion" of troops from Elam, a Ninurta domain in the mountains southeast of Sumer.
Using them to launch military expeditions against the "sinning cities," he himself sought solace in lavish living and lovemaking, becoming a "beloved" of Inanna and conducting banquets and orgies in Erech, in Anu's very temple. Although the military expeditions brought, for the first time ever, Elamite troops to the gateway to the Sinai penThe Age of the Ram 329 insula and its spaceport, they failed to quell the "rebellion" stirred up by Nabu and Marduk.
In the forty-seventh year of his reign, 2049 BC., Shulgi resorted to a desperate stratagem: he ordered the building of a defensive wall along Sumer's western border. To the Enlilite Gods it was tantamount to an abandonment of crucial lands where the Landing Place and Mission Control Center were. So, because "the divine regulations he did not carry out," Enlil decreed Shulgi's death, the "death of a sinner," the very next year.
The retreat from the western lands and the death of Shulgi triggered two moves. As we learn from a biographical text in which Marduk explained his moves and motives, it was then that he decided to return to the proximity of Meso-potamia by arriving in the land of the Hittites. Thereupon, it was also decided that Abram should make a move. In the forty-eight years of Shulgi's reign, Abram matured in Harran from a young bridegroom to a seventy-five-year-old leader, possessing varied knowledge and militarily trained and assisted by his Hittite hosts.
And Abram departed as Yahweh had spoken unto him.
The destination, as chapter 12 of Genesis makes clear, was the vital Land of Canaan; he was to proceed as quickly as possible and station himself and his elite cavalry in the Negev, on the Canaan-Sinai border. His mission, as we have fully detailed in The Wars of Gods and Men, was to protect the gateway to the spaceport.
He arrived there skirting the "sinful cities" of the Canaanites; soon thereafter he went to Egypt, obtaining more troops and camels, for a cavalry, from the last pharaoh of the Memphite dynasties. Back in the Negev, he was ready to fulfill his mission of guarding the spaceport's approaches.
The anticipated conflict came to a head in the seventh year of the reign of Shulgi's successor, Amar-Sin ("Seen by Sin"). It was, even in modern terms, a truly international war in which an alliance of four kings of the East set out from Mesopotamia to attack an alliance of five kings of Canaan. Leading the attack, according to the biblical record in chapter 14 of Genesis, was "Amraphel, the king of Shin'ar" and, for a long time, it was believed that he was the Babylonian king Hammurabi.
In fact, as our own studies have shown, he was the Sumerian Amar-Sin and the tale of the international conflict has been recorded also in Mesopotamian texts, such as the tablets of the Spartoli Collection in the British Museum whose confirmation of the biblical tale was first pointed out by Theophilus Pinches in 1897. Together with complementary fragments, the collection of Mesopotamian tablets dealing with those events has come to be known as the Khedorla omer Texts.
Marching under the banner of Sin and according to oracles given by Inanna/Islitar, the allied army - probably the greatest military force of men ever seen until then - smote one western land after another. Regaining for Sin all the lands between the Euphrates and the Jordan River, they circled the Dead Sea and set as their next target the spaceport in the Sinai peninsula. But there Abram, carrying out his mission, stood in their way; so they turned back north, ready to attack the "evil cities" of the Canaanites. Instead of waiting in their walled cities to be attacked, the Canaanite alliance marched forth and joined battle with the invaders in the Valley of Siddim.
The records, both
biblical and Mesopotamian. suggest an indecisive result. The "evil
cities" were not obliterated, though the flight (and resulting
death) of two kings, those of Sodom and Gomorrah, resulted in booty
and prisoners being carried away from there. Among the prisoners
from Sodom was Abram's nephew Lot; and when Abram heard that, his
cavalry pursued the invaders, catching up with them near Damascus (now the capital of Syria). Lot, other prisoners, and the
booty were retaken and brought back to Canaan. As the Canaanite
kings came out to greet them and Abram, they offered that he keep
the booty as a reward.
The unsuccessful military campaign depressed and con-fused Amar-Sin. According to the Date Formula for the ensuing year, 2040 BC., he left Ur and the worship of Nannar/Sin and became a priest in Eridu, Enki's "cult center." Within another year he was dead, presumably of a scorpion's bite. The year 2040 BC. was even more memorable in Egypt; there, Mentuhotep II, leader of the Theban princes, defeated the northern pharaohs and extended the rule and rules of Ra-Amen throughout Egypt, up to the Sinai boundary.
The victory ushered in what scholars call the Middle Kingdom of the XI and XII dynasties that lasted to about 1790 BC. While the full force and significance of the Age of the Ram came into play in Egypt during the later New Kingdom, the Theban victory of 2040 BC. marked the end of the Age of the Bull in the African domains. If, from a historical perspective, the coming of the Age of the Ram appears to have been inevitable, so must it also have appeared to the principal protagonists and antagonists of that very trying time.
In Canaan, Abram retreated to a mountain stronghold near Hebron. In Sumer, the new king, Shu-Sin, a brother of Amar-Sin, strengthened the defensive walls in the west, sought an alliance with the Nippurites who had settled with Terah in Harran, and built two large ships - possibly as a precaution, with escape in mind ... In a night equivalent to one in February 2031 BC. a major lunar eclipse occurred in Sumer; it was taken to be an ominous omen of the nearing "eclipse" of the Moon God himself.
The first victim, however, was Shu-Sin; for by the
following year he was no longer king. As the word of the celestial
omen, the eclipse of the Moon, spread throughout the ancient Near
East, the required messages of loyalty from viceroys and governors
of the provinces, first in the west and then in the east, ceased.
Unlike any other time in Sumer's and Mesopotamia's long history, omens were cited in unusual frequency. Judging by the record of human behavior one may see in that a known reaction to fear of the unknown and to a search for reassurance or guidance from some higher power or intelligence. But at that time there was a real cause for watching the heavens for omens, for the celestial arrival of the Ram was becoming increasingly evident.
As the texts that have survived from that period attest, the course of events about to happen on Earth was closely linked to celestial phenomena; and each side to the growing confrontation constantly observed the skies for heavenly signs. Since the various Great Anunnaki were associated with celestial counterparts, both zodiacal constellations and the twelve members of the Solar System (as well as with months), the movements and positions of the celestial bodies associated with the chief protagonists were especially sig nificant.
The Moon, counterpart of Ur's great God Nannar/ Sin, the Sun (counterpart of Nannar's son Utu/Shamash), Venus (the planet of Sin's daughter Inanna/Ishtar), and the planets Saturn and Mars (associated with Ninurta and Ner-gal) were especially watched and observed in Ur and Nippur. In addition to all those associations, the various lands of the Sumerian empire were also deemed to belong, celestially, to specific zodiacal constellations: Sumer, Akkad, and Elam were under the sign and protection of Taurus; the Lands of the Westerners, under the sign of Aries.
Hence,
A text designated by scholars Prophecy Text B, known from later copies of the original Sumerian record that was made in Nippur, illustrates how such celestial omens were interpreted as prophecies of the coming doom. In spite of breaks and damage, the impact of the tablet's text retains its predictions of the fateful events to come:
Some of those omen-prophecies directly related the planetary positions to the constellation of the Ram:
One such text, put together through the labor of many scholars from assorted tablets (mostly in the British Museum), is an amazing autobiographical record by Marduk of his exile, agonizing wait for the right celestial omens, and final move to take over the Lordship that he believed was his. Written as a "memoir" by an aging Marduk, he reveals in it his "secrets" to posterity:
Various astronomical texts from the years that marked the transition from Taurus to Aries offer a clue regarding the omens that Marduk was especially interested in. In those texts, as well as in what is called by scholars "mythological texts," the association of Marduk with Jupiter is strongly suggested.
We know that after Marduk had succeeded in The Age of the Ram 335 his ambitions and established himself in Babylon as the supreme deity, such texts as the Epic of Creation were rewritten there so as to associate Marduk with Nibiru, the home planet of the Anunnaki. But prior to that Jupiter, by all indications, was the celestial body of Marduk in his epithet "Son of the Sun"; and a suggestion - made more than a century and a half ago - -that Jupiter might have served in Babylon as a device parallel to that which Sirius had served in Egypt, as the synchronizer of the calendrical cycle, is quite pertinent here.
We refer to a series of lectures delivered at the Royal Institute of Great Britain to the Society of Antiquarians in 1822 (!) by an "antiquarian" named John Landseer in which, in spite of the meager archaeological data then available, he showed an astounding grasp of ancient times. Long before others, and as a result the holder of unaccepted views, he asserted that the "Chaldeans" had known of the phenomenon of precession millennia before the Greeks.
Calling those early times an era "when Astronomy was Religion" and vice versa, he asserted that the calendar was related to the zodiacal "mansion" of the Bull, and that the transition to Aries was associated with "a mystifying conjunction of the Sun and Jupiter in the sign of Aries, at the commencement of the great cycle of intricate [celestial] revolutions." He believed that the Greek myths and legends connecting Zeus/Jupiter with the Ram and its golden fleece reflected that transition to Aries.
And he calculated that such a determining conjunction of Jupiter and the Sun in the boundary between Taurus and Aries had occurred in the year 2142 BC. The notion that Jupiter in a conjunction with the Sun might have served as the Announcer, the herald of the Age of Aries, was also surmised from Babylonian astronomical tablets in a series of papers titled "Euphratean Stellar Researches" by Robert Brown in the Proceedings of the Society of Biblical Archaeology, London, in 1893.
Focusing in particular on two astronomical tablets (British Museum catalogue numbers K.2310 and K.2894), Brown concluded that they dealt with the position of stars, constellations, and planets as seen in Babylon at midnight on a date equivalent to July 10, 2000 BC.
Apparently quoting Nabu in reference to his "proclamation of the planet of the Prince of Earth'' - presumably Jupiter - appearing in an "ocular instance which took place in the sign of Aries," the texts were translated by Brown into a "star map" that showed Jupiter in near conjunction with the brightest star (Lulim, known by its Arabic name Hamal) of Aries and just off the point of the spring equinox, when the zodiacal path and the planetary path (celestial equator and ecliptic) cross (Fig. 158).
Fig. 158
Dealing with the transitions from one Age to another as recorded in the Mesopotamian tablets, various Assyriologists (as they were called at the time) - e.g. Franz Xavier Kugler (Im Bannkreis Babels) - have pointed out that while the transition from Gemini to Taurus was ascertainable with relative precision, that from Taurus to Aries was less de-terminable timewise. Kugler believed that the vernal equinox signaling the New Year was still in Taurus in 2300 BC., and noted that the Babylonians had assumed the Zeitalter, the new zodiacal Age to have come into effect in 2151 BC.
It is probably no coincidence that the same date marked an important innovation in Egyptian practices of depicting the heavens. According to the masterwork on the subject of ancient Egyptian astronomy, Egyptian Astronomical Texts by O. Neugebauer and Richard A. Parker, celestial imaging including the thirty-six Decans began to be painted on coffin lids circa 2150 BC. - coinciding with the chaotic First Intermediate Period, the start of the Theban push northward to supersede Memphis and Heliopolis, and the time when Marduk/Ra read the omens in his favor.
Coffin lids, as time went by and the Age of the Ram was no longer contested, clearly depicted the new Celestial Age, as this illustration from a tomb near Thebes shows (Fig. 159). The four-headed Ram dominates the four corners of the heavens (and the Earth too); the Bull of Heaven is shown pierced with a spear or lance; and the twelve zodiacal constellations, in their Sumerian-devised order and symbols, are arranged so that the constellation of Aries is precisely in the east, i.e., where the Sun appears on the Day of the Equinox. If the determining or triggering omen for Marduk/Ra was the conjunction of Jupiter and the Sun in the "mansion" of Aries, and if it did occur in 2142 BC. as John Landseer suggested, then this heralding more or less coincided with the arithmetically calculated (once in 2,160 years) zodiacal shift.
Fig. 159
That, however, would have meant that the claim that the shift to Aries had come about preceded by about a century and a half the observational shift of the vernal equinox into Aries in 2000 BC. as attested by the two tablets. That discrepancy could explain, at least in part, the disagreement at that time regarding what the celestial omens or observations were truly portending.
As the autobiographical Marduk text admits, even the omen that signified to him the time to end his wanderings and come to Hatti Land, the Land of the Hittites in Asia Minor, occurred twenty-four years before his next move. But that and other celestial omens were also watched closely on the Enlilite side; and although the Ram had not yet fully dominated the New Year's day on the spring equinox in the time of Ibbi-Sin, the last king of Ur, the oracle priests interpreted the omens as portents of the disastrous end.
In the fourth year of Ibbi-Sin's reign (2026 BC.) the oracle priests told him that according to the omens, "For the second time, he who calls himself Supreme, like one whose chest has been anointed, shall come from the west." With such predictions Sumerian cities, in the fifth year of IbbiSin's reign, ceased the delivery of the traditional sacrificial animals for Nannar's temple in Ur. That same year the omen-priests prophesied that "when the sixth year comes, the inhabitants of Ur will be trapped."
In the following, sixth year, the omens of destruction and ruin became more urgent and Mesopotamia itself, the heartland of Sumer and Akkad, was invaded. The inscriptions record that in the sixth year the "hostile Westerners had entered the plain, had entered the interior of the country, taking one by one all the great fortresses." In the twenty-fourth year of his sojourn in the Land of the Hittites, Marduk received another omen:
The partly damaged tablet then describes Marduk's route from Anatolia back to Babylon; the cities named indicate that he first went south to Hama (the biblical Hamat), then crossed the Euphratesat Mari; he indeed returned, as the omens had predicted, from the west. The year was 2024 BC. In his autobiographical memoirs Marduk described how he had expected his return to Babylon to be a triumphant one, opening an era of well-being and prosperity for its people.
He envisaged the establishment of a new royal dynasty, and foresaw as the first task of the new king the rebuilding of the Esagil, the temple-ziggurat of Babylon, according to a new "ground plan of Heaven and Earth" - one in accord with the New Age of the Ram:
Undoubtedly mindful of the manner in which Ninurta'sziggurat-temple at Lagash was decorated and embellished, Marduk envisioned his own new temple, the Esagil ("House whose head is loftiest"), decorated with bright and precious metals:
And when all that shall be com-pleted, Marduk mused, astronomer-priests shall ascend the ziggurat's stages and observe the heavens, confirming his rightful supremacy:
When the Esagil was eventually built, it was erected according to very detailed and precise plans; its orientation, height, and various stages were indeed such that its head pointed directly (see Fig. 33) to the star Iku, the lead star of the constellation Aries.
But Marduk's ambitious vision was not to be fulfilled right then and there. In the very same year that he began his march back to Babylon at the head of a horde of West ern supporters organized by Nabu, a most awesome catastrophe befell the ancient Near East - a calamity the likes of which neither Mankind nor Earth itself had previously experienced. He expected that once the omens were clear, both Gods and men would heed his call for accepting his supremacy without further resistance. "I called on the Gods, all of them, to heed me," Marduk wrote in his memoirs. "I called on the people along my march, 'bring your tribute to Babylon.' "
Instead, he encountered a scorched-earth policy: the Gods in charge of cattle and grains left, "to heaven they went up," and the God in charge of beer "made sick the heart of the land." The advance turned violent and bloody. "Brother consumed brother, friends slew each other with the sword, corpses of people blocked the gates." The land The Age or the Ram 341 was laid waste, wild animals devoured people, packs of dogs bit people to death.
As Marduk's followers continued their advance, the temples and shrines of other Gods began to be desecrated. The greatest sacrilege was the defilement of Enlil's temple in Nippur, until then the venerated religious center of all the lands and all the peoples. When Enlil heard that even the Holy of Holies was not spared, that "in the holy of holies the veil was torn away," he rushed back to Mesopotamia. He "set off a brilliance like lightning'1 as he came down from the skies; "riding in front of him were Gods clothed with radiance." Seeing what had happened, "Enlil evil against Babylon caused to be planned."
He ordered that Nabu be seized and brought before the Council of the Gods, and Ninurta and Nergal were given the assignment. But they found that Nabu had escaped from his temple in Borsippa, on the Euphratean border, to hide among his followers in Canaan and the Mediterranean islands. Meeting in Council, the leading Anunnaki debated what to do, discussing the alternatives "a day and a night, without ceasing."
Only Enki spoke up in defense of his son: "Now that prince Marduk has risen, now that the people for the second time have raised his image," why does opposition continue? He reprimanded Nergal for opposing his brother; but Nergal, "standing before him day and night without cease," argued that the celestial omens were being misread. "Let Shamash" - the Sun God - "see the signs and inform the people," he said; "Let Nannar" - the Moon God - "at his sign look and impart that to the land."
Referring
to a constellation-star whose identity is being debated, Nergal said
that "among the stars of heaven the Fox Star was twinkling its rays
to him." He was seeing other omens - "dazzling stars of heaven that
carry a sword" - comets streaking in the skies. He wanted to know what
these new omens meant. As the exchanges between Enki and Nergal
became harsher, Nergal, "leaving in a huff," announced that it was
necessary to "activate that which with a mantle of radiance is
covered," and thereby make the "evil people perish."
The description of the weapons and the consequences of their use clearly identifies them as nuclear weapons. It was Inanna who had pointed out that time was running out. "Until the time is fulfilled, the hour will be past!" she told the arguing Gods; "pay attention, all of you," she said, advising them to continue their deliberations in private, lest the plan of attack be divulged to Marduk (presumably by Enki). "Cover your lips," she told Enlil and the others, "go into your private quarters!"
In the privacy of the Emeslam temple, Ninurta spoke up. "The time has elapsed, the hour has passed," he said. '"Open up a path and let me take the road!" The die was cast. Of the various extant sources dealing with the fateful chain of events, the principal and most intact one is the Erra Epic.
It describes in great detail the discussions, the arguments for and against, the fears for the future if Marduk and his followers should control the spaceport and its aux-iliary facilities. Details are added by the Khedorlaomer Texts and inscriptions on various tablets, such as those in the Oxford Editions of Cuneiform Texts.
They all describe the ominous and fateful march to its culmination, of which we can read in Genesis, chapters 18 and 19: the "upheavaling" of Sodom and Gomorrah and of the "evil cities" of their plain, "and all the inhabitants of the cities, and all that which grew on the ground." The upheavaling and wiping off the face of the Earth of the "evil cities" was only a sideshow.
The main target of obliteration was the spaceport in the Sinai peninsula. "That which was raised toward Anu to launch,'' the Mesopotamian texts state, Ninurta and Nergal "caused to wither; its face they made fade away, its place they made desolate."
The year was 2024 BC.; the evidence - the immense cavity in the center of the Sinai and the resulting fracture lines, the vast surrounding flat area covered with blackened stones, traces of radiation south of the Dead Sea, the new extent and shape of the Dead Sea - is still there, four thousand years later. The aftereffects were no less profound and lasting.
The nuclear blasts and their brilliant flashes and earthshaking impact were neither seen nor felt far away in Mesopotamia; but as it turned out, the attempt to save Sumer, its Gods, and its culture in fact led to a dismal end for Sumer and its civilization. The bitter end of Sumer and her great urban centers is described in numerous Lamentation Texts, long poems that bewail the demise of Ur, Nippur, Uruk, Eridu, and other famed and less famed cities.
Typical of the calamities that befell the once proud and prosperous land are those listed in the Lamentation Over the Destruction of Ur, a long poem of some 440 verses of which we shall quote but a few:
For a long time scholars have held the view that the various lamentation texts dealt with the successive but separate destruction of Sumer's cities by invaders from the west, the east, the north.
But in The Wars of Gods and Men we have suggested that it was not so; that what these lamentations deal with was one single countrywide calamity, an unusual catastrophe and a sudden disaster against which no protection, no defense, no hiding was possible. This view, of a single sudden and overwhelming calamity, is now increasingly accepted by scholars; yet to be accepted is the evidence that we have presented that the calamity was linked to the "upheavaling" of the "evil cities" and the spaceport in the west.
It was the unexpected development of an atmospheric vacuum, creating an immense whirlwind and a storm that carried the radioactive cloud eastward - toward Sumer. The various available texts, and not just the lamentation texts, clearly speak of the calamity as an unstoppable storm, an Evil Wind, and clearly identify it as the result of an unforgettable day when a nuclear blast had created it near the Mediterranean coast:
After the deadly cloud had moved on, "after the storm was carried off from the city, that city was turned into desolation": It caused cities to be desolated. It caused houses to become desolate, It caused stalls to become desolate, the sheepfolds to be emptied... Sumer's rivers it made flow with water that is bitter; its cultivated fields grow weeds, its pastures grow withering plants. It was a death-carrying storm that endangered even the Gods.
The lamentations list virtually every major Sumerian city as places where their Gods had abandoned their abodes, temples, and shrines - in most cases never to return. Some escaped the approaching cloud of death hurriedly, "flying off as a bird." Inanna, having rushed to sail off to a safe haven, later complained that she had to leave behind her jewelry and other possessions.
The story, however, was not the same everywhere. In Ur, Nannar and Ningal refused to abandon their followers and appealed to the great Enlil to do whatever possible to avert the disaster, but Enlil responded that the fate of Ur could not be changed. The divine couple spent a nightmarish night in Ur: "Of that night's foulness they did not flee," hiding underground "as termites."
But in the morning Ningal realized that Nannar/Sin had been afflicted, and "hastily putting on a garment" de-parted the beloved Ur with the stricken mate. In Lagash, where with Ninurta away Bau had stayed in the Girsu by herself, the Goddess could not force herself to leave. Lingering behind "she wept bitterly for her holy temple, for her city." The delay almost cost her her life: "On that day, the storm caught up with her, with the Lady." (Indeed, some scholars deem the ensuing verse in the lamentation to indicate that Bau had in fact lost her life: "Bau. as if she were a mortal, the storm had caught up with her.")
Fanning out in a wide swath over what used to be Sumer and Akkad, the Evil Wind's path touched Eridu, Enki's city, in the south. Enki, we learn, took cover some distance away from the wind's path, yet close enough to be able to return to the city after the cloud had passed. He found a city "smothered with silence, its residents stacked up in heaps." But here and there there were survivors, and Enki led them southward, to the desert.
It was an "inimical land," uninhabitable; but using his scientific prowess, Enki - like Yahweh half a millennium later in the Sinai desert - managed miraculously to provide water and food for "those who have been displaced from Eridu." As fate would have it, Babylon, situated on the northern edge of the Evil Wind's wide swath, was the least affected of all the Mesopotamian cities.
Alerted and advised by his father, Marduk urged the city's people to leave and hurry northward; and, in words reminiscent of the angels' advice to Lot and his family as they were told to leave Sodom before its upheavaling, Marduk told the escapees "neither to turn nor to look back. " If escape was not possible, they were told to "get thee into a chamber below the earth, into The Age of the Ram 347 a darkness."
Once the Evil Storm had passed, they were not to consume any of the food or beverage in the city, for they might have been "touched by the ghost." When the air finally cleared, all of southern Mesopotamia lay prostrate.
Life began to stir anew only seven years later. Backed by Elamite and Gutian troops loyal to Ninurta, a semblance of organized society returned to Sumer under rulers seated in former provincial centers, Isin and Larsa. It was only after the passage of seventy years - the same interval that later applied to the restoration of the temple in Jerusalem - that the temple in Nippur was restored.
But the "Gods who determine the destinies," Anu and Enlil, saw no purpose in resurrecting the past. As Enlil had told Nannar/Sin who had appealed in behalf of Ur - Ur was granted kingship - it was not granted an eternal reign. Marduk had won out. Within a few decades, his vision of a king in Babylon who would grasp his hand, rebuild the city, raise high its ziggurat Esagil - had come true.
After a halting start, the First Dynasty of Babylon attained the intended power and assurance that were expressed by Hammurabi:
In Egypt, unaffected by the nuclear cloud, the transition to the Age of the Ram began right after the Theban victory and the enthronement of the Middle Kingdom dynasties. When the celebrations of the New Year, coinciding with the rising of the Nile, were adjusted to the New Age, hymns to Ra-Amen praised him thus:
Under the New Kingdom, temple avenues were lined with statues of the Ram; and in the great temple to Amon-Ra in Karnak, in a secret observation perch that had to be opened on the day of the winter solstice to let in the Sun's rays through the path to the Holy of Holies, the following instructions were inscribed for the astronomer-priest: One goes toward the hall called Horizon of the Sky.
One climbs the Aha, "Lonesome place of the majestic soul,'' the high room for watching the Ram who sails across the skies. In Mesopotamia, slowly but surely, the ascendancy of the Age of the Ram was recognized by changes in the calendar and in the lists of the celestial stars. Such lists, that used to begin with Taurus, now began with Aries; and for Nissan, the month of the spring equinox and the New Year, the zodiac of Aries rather than Taurus was thereafter written in.
An example is the Babylonian astrolabe ("taker of stars") that we have discussed earlier {see Fig. 102) in connection with the origin of the division into thirty-six segments. It clearly inscribed the star Iku as the defining celestial body for the first month Nisannu. Iku was the "alpha" or lead star of the constellation of the Ram; it is still known by its Arabic name Hamal, meaning "male sheep."
The New Age had arrived, in the heavens and on Earth. It was to dominate the next two millennia and the astronomy that the "Chaldeans" had transmitted to the Greeks. When, in the closing years of the fourth century BC., Alexander came to believe that he was entitled - like Gilgamesh 2,500 years earlier - to immortality because his true father was the Egyptian God Amon, he went to the God's oracle place in Egypt's western desert to seek confirmation. Having received it, he struck silver coins bearing his image adorned with the horns of the Ram (Fig. 160).
Figure 160
A few centuries later the Ram faded and was replaced by the sign of the Fishes, Pisces. But that, as the saying goes, is already history.
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