Page Content (OCR)
114 Sumerian cuneiform writing and the scripts of China, Korea, and Japan. The similarity is not only in the script: many similar glyphs are identically pronounced and also have the same meanings. In Japan, civilization has beeen attribute to an enigmatic forefather-tribe called AINU. The emperor’s family has been deemed to be a line of demigods descende from the Sun-god, and the investiture ceremonies of a new king include a secret solitary nightly stay with the Sun god- dess—a ritual ceremony that uncannily emulates the Sacre Marriage rites in ancient Sumer, when the new king spent a night with Inanna/Ishtar. In the erstwhile Four Regions, the migratory waves of di- verse peoples triggered by the nuclear calamity and Marduk’s New Age, much like flowing and overflowing rivers an rivulets after stormy rains, filled the pages of the ensuing centuries with the rise and fall of nations, states, and city- states. Into the Sumerian void, newcomers came in from near and far; their arena, their central stage, remained what can rightly be called the Lands of the Bible. Indeed, until the advent of modern archaeology, little or nothing was known about most of them except for their mention in the Hebrew Bible; it provided not only a record of those various peoples, but also of their “national gods”—and of the wars fought in the name of those gods. But then nations such as the Hittites, states such as Mi- THE END OF DAYS FIGURE 48