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More than 2,500 years after the epic search for Immortality by Gilgamesh, another legendary king—Alexander of Mace- donia—emulated the Sumerian king and Egyptian Pharaohs in the very same arena. In his case, too, the claim to Immor- tality was based on being partly divine. The evidence suggests that Alexander, through his teacher Aristotle, was aware of the earlier searches; but what he probably did not know was that the root of his specific claim to divine parentage lay in Uruk's GIPAR ("Nighttime House") and its inner sanctum, the GIGUNU. Soon after Alexander was crowned king of Macedonia in lieu of the assassinated Philip II, he went to Delphi in Greece to consult its famed Oracle. Only twenty years old at the time, he was shocked to hear the first of several prophecies predicting for him fame, but a very short life. The prophecies served to increase his belief in rumors that had been circulat- ing in the Macedonian court, according to which Philip I was not really his father; but that he was really the son of an Egyptian Pharaoh by name of Nectanebus who had visited the Macedonian court and secretly seduced Olympias, Alex- ander's mother. And Nectanebus—a master magician and di- viner—so the whispering went, was in fact the Egyptian god Amon, who disguised himself as a man in order to sire the future conqueror of the world. No sooner did Alexander reach Egypt (in 332 B.C.) man, after paying homage to Egyptian gods and priests, he set his course to the oasis of Siwah in the western desert, the seat of a renowned Oracle of Amon. There (so the historians who 161 ENCOUNTERS IN THE GIGUNU