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176 the morning the king emerged, for all to see that he had survived the night. The Sacred Marriage had taken place; the king could reign on for another year; the land and people were granted prosperity. "The Sacred Marriage Rite was celebrated joyously and rapturously all over the ancient Near East for some two thou- sand years," the great Sumerologist Samuel N. Kramer wrote in The Sacred Marriage Rite. Indeed, long after the days of Dumuzi and Gilgamesh, Sumerian kings described poetically the ecstasy of such memorable nights with Ishtar. The biblical Song of Songs described the pleasures of love in the Ta'an- nugim and several of the Prophets foresaw the demise of the "House of Annugim" (House of Pleasures) of the "Daughter of Babylon" (Ishtar); and it is apparent to us that the Hebrew term stemmed from the Sumerian Gigunu, indicating familiar- ity with the Chamber of Pleasures and the rite of the Sacred Marriage well into the middle of the first millennium B.C. In the olden days the Gipar was the separate structure to which the god and his official spouse retired for the night. The gods who stayed monogamous—Enlil, Ninurta—have kept it that way. Ishtar, in her city Uruk, met her betrothed Dumuzi there but turned the inner chamber, the Gigunu, to a place of one-night stands. The changes introduced by Ish- tar—the use of the Gipar for a new form of Divine Encoun- ter—gave ideas to some of the male deities of that time. Some of the best-preserved records in this regard concern Nannar/Sin (the father of Inanna/Ishtar) and the Gipar in his sacred precinct in Ur. The role played by the male king in Ishtar's rites was played by an Entu, a "God's Lady," (NIN.- DINGIR in Sumerian). Excavations there unearthed the quar- ters of the Entu in the southeastern part of the sacred precinct, not too far from the ziggurat of Sin and clearly away from the temple-abode of his spouse Ningal. Near the Gigunu of the Entu the archaeologists found a cemetery where genera- tions of Entus were buried. The cemetery, and the uncovered structures, confirmed that the practice of having a "God's Lady" besides the official spouse extended from the early Dynastic Period well into Neo-Babylonian times—a span of time exceeding two millennia. DIVINE ENCOUNTERS