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According to Genesis (chapter 11) Mankind had “one lan- guage and one kind of words" before Sumer was settled. But as a result of the Tower of Babel incident, Yahweh, who had come down to see what was going on, said to (un- named) colleagues: "Behold, they are one people and they all have one tongue . . . Let us descend and confound there their tongue so that they may not understand each other's speech." It happened, by our calculations, circa 3450 B.c. This tradition reflects Sumerian assertions that "once upon a time," in an idyllic past when "man had no rivals" and all the lands "rested in security," "the people in unison to Enlil in one tongue gave speech." Those idyllic times are recalled in a Sumerian text known as Enmerkar and the Lord of Aratta that deals with a power struggle and a test of wills between Enmerkar, a ruler of Uruk (the biblical Erech), and the king of Aratta (in the Indus Valley) circa 2850 B.c. The dispute concerned the extent of the powers of Ishtar, Enlil's granddaughter, who could not make up her mind whether to re- side in faraway Aratta or stay in the then-unimportant Erech. Viewing the expansion of Enlilite control unfavorably, Enki sought to inflame the War of Words between the two rulers by confusing their language. So "Enki, the lord of Eridu, endowed with knowledge, changed the speech in their mouths" to create contentions between "prince and prince, king and king." According to J. van Dijk ("La confusion des langues" in Orientalia vol. 39), the last verse in this passage should be translated "the language of Mankind, once upon a time one, for the second time was confused" (italics by the author). Whether the verse means that it was Enki who for the second time confused the languages, or simply that it was he who was responsible for the second confusion but not necessarily for the first one, is not clear from the text. THE CONFUSION OF LANGUAGES