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114 If we accept the biblical data as an abbreviated version, yet one that is chronologically and otherwise correct, of the Sumerian sources, we learn that in the aftermath of the Del- uge, as Mankind proliferated and the Tigris-Euphrates plain was drying up sufficiently for resettlement, people "jour- neyed from the east, and they found a plain in the land of Shine'ar and they settled there. And they said to one another: Let us make bricks, and burn them in a kiln. And thus the brick served them for stone, and bitumen served them as mortar." This is quite an accurate if concise description of the begin- ning of Sumerian civilization and some of its "firsts"—the brick, the kiln, and the first City of Men; for what ensued was the building of a city and of a "Tower whose head can reach unto heaven." Nowadays we call such a structure a launch rower, and its "head" that can reach the heavens is called a rocketship . . . We have arrived, in the biblical narrative and chronologi- cally, at the incident of the Tower of Babel—the unauthorized construction of a space facility. So "Yahweh came down to see the city and the tower that the Children of Adam were building." Not liking at all what he was seeing, Yahweh expressed his concerns to unnamed colleagues. "Come, let us descend and confound there their tongue, so that they may not under- stand one another's speech," he said. And so it was. "And Yahweh scattered them from there upon all over the Earth, and they ceased building the city." The Bible identifies the place where the attempt to scale the heavens had taken place as Babylon, explaining its He- brew name Babel as derived from the root "to confuse." In fact the original Mesopotamian name, Bab-ili, meant "Gate- way of the Gods," a place intended by Marduk, the Firstborn son of Enki, to serve as an alternative launch site, free of Enlilite control. Coming in the wake of what we had termed the Pyramid Wars, the incident was timed by us to circa 3450 B.C.—several centuries after the beginning of Kingship in Kish and thus in about the same time frame as that of the Etana events. DIVINE ENCOUNTERS