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132 at Figure 39 He saw everything to the ends of Earth, All things experienced, gained complete wisdom. Secret things he saw, the mysteries he laid hare. He brought back a tale of times before the Flood. According to the Sumerian King Lists, after the reign of twenty-three kings in Kish, "Kingship was removed to the Eanna." The E.ANNA was the House (temple-ziggurat) of Anu in the sacred precinct of Uruk (the biblical Erech). There a semidivine dynasty began with Meskiaggasher, "the son of the god Utu," who was the high priest of the Eanna temple and became king as well. He was followed on the royal throne by his son Enmerkar ("He who built Uruk," the great city beside the sacred precinct) and his grandson Lugal- banda—both rulers of whom heroic tales were written down. After a brief interregnum by the divine Dumuzi (whose life, loves, and death are a tale by themselves), Gilgamesh (Fig. 39) ascended the throne. His name was sometimes written with the "Dingir" prefix, to indicate his divinity: for his mother was a full-fledged goddess, the goddess Ninsun; and that, as the great and long Epic of Gilgamesh explained, made him "two-thirds divine." (His father, Lugalbanda, was appar- ently only the High Priest when Gilgamesh was born.) At the beginning of his reign Gilgamesh was a benevolent king, enlarging and reinforcing his city and caring for its citizens. But as the years passed (he ruled, according to the DIVINE ENCOUNTERS