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Figure I creation in the Bible. The seventh tablet was devoted to the exaltation of the supreme Babylonian deity Marduk as_ he surveyed his marvelous handiwork (paralleling the biblical seventh "day" on which God "rested from all His work that He had made"). Scholars now know that these and other "myths" in their Assyrian and Babylonian versions were translations of earlier Sumerian texts (modified to glorify the Assyrian or Babylonian supreme gods). History, as the great scholar Samuel N. Kramer has so excellently expounded in his 1959 book of that title, Begins at Sumer. It all began, we learn from the various texts, a very long time ago, with the splashing down in the waters of the Persian Gulf or the Arabian Sea of a group of fifty ANUNNAKI— a term literally meaning "Those Who from Heaven to Earth Came." They waded ashore under the leadership of E.A ("He Whose House Is Water"), a brilliant scientist, and es- tablished the first extraterrestrial colony on Earth, calling it E.RLDU ("House in the Faraway Built"). Other settlements followed in pursuit of the visitors' mission: Obtaining gold by distilling the waters of the Persian Gulf—gold needed DIVINE ENCOUNTERS