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100 when?” from his command post in Harran when the fateful events took place. In his autobiographical text The Marduk Prophecy he envisioned the coming of a Messianic Time, when gods and men will recognize his supremacy, when peace shall replace war and abundance will banish suffering, when a king of his choice “will make Babylon the foremost” with the Esagil temple (as its name meant) raising its head to heaven— A king in Babylon will arise; In my city Babylon, in its midst, my temple to heaven he will raise; The mountainlike Esagil he will renew, the ground plan of Heaven-Earth for the mountainlike Esagil he will draw; The Gate of Heaven will be opened. In my city Babylon a king will arise; In abundance he will reside; My hand he will grasp, He will lead me in processions .. . To my city and my temple Esagil for eternity I shall enter. That new Tower of Babel, however, was not intended (as the first one was) as a launch tower. His supremacy, Marduk recognized, was now stemming not only from the posses- sion of a physical space connection but from the Signs of Heaven—from the zodiacal Celestial Time, from the posi- tion and movement of the celestial bodies, the Kakkabu (stars/planets) of heaven. Accordingly, he envisioned the future Esagil as the reign- ing astronomical observatory, making redundant Ninurta’s Eninnu and the varied stonehenges erected by Thoth. When the Esagil was eventually built, it was a ziggurat erected ac- cording to detailed and precise plans (Fig. 40): its height, the spacing of its seven stages, and its orientation were such that its head pointed directly to the star Jku—the lead star of the constellation of the Ram—circa 1960 B.C.E. The nuclear apocalypse and its unintended consequences THE END OF DAYS