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been a statue to Marduk = Mars, the highest of the gods, that weighed 800 talents of pure gold. If we are to believe Herodotus, that is equivalent to more than 48,000 Ib of gold. Ninurta = Sirius was judge of the universe and passed sentence on mortal men. There are cuneiform tablets which were addressed to Mars, to Sirius and to the Pleiades. Time and again Sumerian hymns and prayers mention divine weapons, the form and effect of which must have been completely senseless to the people of those days. A panegyric to Mars says that he made fire rain down and destroyed his enemies with a brilliant lightning flash. Inanna is described as she traverses the heavens, radiating a frightful blinding gleam and annihilating the houses of the enemy. Drawings and even the model of a home have been found resembling a prefabricated atomic bunker; round and massive, with a single strangely framed aperture. From the same period, about 3000 B.C., archaeologists have found a model of a team with chariot, and driver, as well as two sportsmen wrestling, all of immaculate craftsmanship. The Sumerians, it has been proved, were masters of applied art. Then why did they model a clumsy bunker, when other excavations at Babylon or Uruk have brought much subtler works to light? Quite recently a whole Sumerian library of about 60,000 clay tablets was found in the town of Nippur, 95 miles south of Baghdad. We now possess the oldest account of the Flood, engraved on a tablet in six columns. Five antediluvian cities are named on the tablets: Eridu, Badtibira, Larak, Sitpar and Shuruppak. Two of these cities have not yet been discovered. On these tablets, the oldest deciphered to date, the Noah of the Sumerians is called Ziusudra; he is supposed to have lived in Shuruppak and also to have built his ark there. So we now possess an even older description of the Flood than the one in the Epic of Gilgamesh. No one knows whether new finds will not produce still earlier accounts. The men of the ancient cultures seem to have been almost obsessed with the idea of immortality or rebirth. Servants and slaves obviously laid down voluntarily in the tomb with their masters. In the burial chamber of Shub-At, no less than seventy skeletons lay next to each other in perfect order. Without the least sign of violence, sitting or lying in their brilliantly coloured robes, they awaited the death which must have come swiftly and painlessly—perhaps by poison. With unshakeable conviction, they looked forward to a new life beyond the grave with their masters. But who put the idea of rebirth into the heads of these heathen peoples? The Egyptian pantheon is just as confusing. The ancient texts of the people on the Nile also tell of mighty beings who traversed the firmament in boats. A cuneiform text to the sun god, Ra, runs: ‘Thou couplest under the stars and the moon, thou drawest the ship of Aten in heaven and on earth like the tirelessly revolving stars and the stars at the North Pole that do not set.’ Even if the old Egyptian mathematicians were very advanced, it is odd that they should speak of millions of years in connexion with the stars and a heavenly ship. What does the Mahabharata say? ‘Time is the seed of the universe.’ Here is an inscription from a pyramid: Though art he who directs the sun ship of millions of years.’ In Memphis the god Ptah handed the king two models with which to celebrate the anniversaries of his