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Sumer; its people called it Shumer ("Land of the Guard- ians"). It is to ancient Sumer that we have to go to under- stand the biblical tale of Creation and the ancient Near Eastern record of Divine Encounters; for it is there, in Sumer, that the recording of those events began. Sumer (the biblical Shine'ar) was the land where the first known and fully documented civilization sprang up after the Deluge, appearing suddenly and all at once some six thousand years ago. It gave Humankind almost every "first" in all that matters as integral components of a high civilization—not just the first brickmaking (as mentioned above) and the first kilns, but also the first high-rise temples and palaces, the first priests and kings; the first wheel, the first kiln, the first medi- cine and pharmacology; the first musicians and dancers, arti- sans and craftsmen, merchants and caravaneers, law codes and judges, weights and measures. The first astronomers and observatories were there, and the first mathematicians. And perhaps most important of all: it was there, as early as 3800 B.C., that writing began, making Sumer the land of the first scribes who wrote down on clay tablets in the wedgelike script ("cuneiform") the most astounding tales of gods and humans (as this "Creation of Man" tablet, Fig. 1). Scholars regard these ancient texts as myths. We, however, consider them to be records of events that have essentially happened. The archaelogists' spades not only verified the existence of Shine'ar/Sumer. The finds also brought to light ancient texts from Mesopotamia that paralleled the biblical tales of Creation and the Deluge. In 1876 George Smith of the British Museum, piecing together broken tablets found in the royal library of Nineveh (the Assyrian capital), published The Chal- dean Genesis and showed beyond doubt that the biblical tale of Creation was first written down in Mesopotamia millennia of years earlier. In 1902 L.W. King, also of the British Museum, in his book The Seven Tablets of Creation, published a fuller text, in the Old Babylonian language, that required seven clay tablets—so long and detailed it was. Known as the Epic of Creation or as Enuma elish by its opening words, its first six tablets describe the creation of the heavens and the Earth and all upon Earth, including Man, paralleling the six "days" of The First Encounters