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94 seek advice: What are the people of Babylon to do? he asked. Those who can escape should go north, Enki told him; and in the manner of the two “Angels” who had advised Lot and his family not to look back when they fled Sodom, so did Enki instruct Marduk to tell his followers “neither to turn nor to look back.” If escape was not possible, the people should seek shelter underground: “Get them into a chamber below the earth, into a darkness,” was Enki’s advice. Following this advice, and due to the wind’s direction, Babylon and its peo- ple were unharmed. As the Evil Wind passed and blew away (its remnants, we learn, reached the Zagros Mountains farther east), it left Sumer desolate and prostrate. “The storm desolated the cit- ies, desolated the houses.” The dead, lying where they fell, remained unburied: “The dead people, like fat placed in the sun, of themselves melted away.” In the grazing lands, “cattle large and small became scarce, all living creatures came to an end.” The sheepfolds “were delivered to the Wind.” The cultivated fields withered; “on the banks of the Tigris and the Euphrates only sickly weeds grew, in the swamps the reeds rotted in a stench.” “No one treads the highways, no one seeks out the roads.” “Oh Temple of Nannar in Ur, bitter is thy desolation!” the lamentation poems bewailed; “Oh Ningal whose land has perished, make thy heart like water!” The city has become a strange city, how can one now exist? The house has become a house of tears, it makes my heart like water. Ur and its temples have been delivered to the Wind. After two thousand years, the great Sumerian civilization was gone with the wind. In recent years archaeologists have been joined by geolo- gists, climatologists, and other earth sciences experts for multidisciplinary efforts to tackle the enigma of the abrupt THE END OF DAYS