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335 Commenting on those times, in Babylon and Assyria, H.W.F. Saggs (The Greatness That Was Babylon) states that "the dislocation was so bad that a chronicle dating to about 990 B.c. records that ‘for nine years successively Marduk did not go forth, Nabu did not come,' that is to say, the New Year Feast, at which Marduk of Babylon went out of the city to a shrine called the Akitu-house and Nabu of Borsippa vis- ited him on his return to the city, was not carried out." In those circumstances not only could the Hebrew king- doms rise, but also those of their immediate neighbors—the Edomites, Moabites, Arameans, Phoenicians, Philistines. Their border wars and encroachments were small local affairs compared to the titanic battles of the erstwhile empires in past centuries—and to the major onslaughts that were in the offing. In 879 B.C. a new capital, Kalhu (the biblical Calah) was ceremoniously inaugurated in Assyria; and the event can be historically considered as the start of the Neo-Assyrian pe- riod. Its hallmarks were expansion, domination, warfare, car- nage, and unparalleled brutality—all in the name of "the great god Ashur" and other deities of the Assyrian pantheon. Prophets of an Unseen God Figures 108a and 108b