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If the prophecies and messianic expectations attendant on the New Age of the twenty-first century B.c.E. look familiar to us today, the battle cries of the subsequent centuries would not sound strange, either. If in the third millennium B.c.E. god fought god using armies of men, in the second millen- nium B.c.E. men fought men “in the name of god.” It took just a few centuries after the start of Marduk’s New Age to show that the fulfillment of his prophecies of gran- deur would not easily come. Significantly, the resistance came not so much from the dispersed Enlilite gods but from the people, the masses of their loyal worshippers! More than a century had to pass from the time of the nuclear ordeal until Babylon (the city) emerged on the stage of history as Babylonia (the state) under its First Dynasty. During that interval southern Mesopotamia—the Sumer of old—was left to recover in the hands of temporary rulers headquartered in Isin and then in Larsa; their theophoric names—Lipit-/shtar, Ur-Ninurta, Rim-Sin, Enlil-Bani—flaunted their Enlilite loy- alties. Their crowning achievement was the restoration of Nip- pur’s temple exactly seventy-two years after the nuclear havoc—another indication of where their loyalties lay, and of an adherence to a zodiacal time count. Those non-Babylonian rulers were scions of Semitic- speaking royals from a city-state called Mari. As one looks at a map showing the nation-states of the first half of the second millennium B.c.£. (Fig. 50), it becomes clear that the non-Mardukite states formed a formidable vise around Greater Babylon, starting with Elam and Gutium on the IN THE NAME OF GOD