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130 The ancient search for an answer, it seems, has continued to our very own time. The most unremitting adversary of Babylon was the Assyr- ians. Their province, in the upper region of the Tigris River, was called Subartu in Sumerian times and was the north- ernmost extension of Sumer & Akkad. In language and ra- cial origins they appear to have had a kinship to Sargon of Akkad, so much so that when Assyria became a kingdom and imperial power, some of its most famous kings took the name Sharru-kin—Sargon—as their royal name. All that, gleaned from archaeological finds in the past two centuries, corroborates the succint statements in the Bible (Genesis, Chapter 10) that listed the Assyrians among the descendants of Shem, and Assyria’s capital Nineveh and other principal cities as “coming out of ””—an outgrowth, an extension of—Shine’ar (Sumer). Their pantheon was the Su- merian pantheon—their gods were the Anunnaki of Sumer & Akkad; and the theophoric names of Assyrian kings and high officials indicated reverence to the gods Ashur, Enlil, Ninurta, Sin, Adad, and Shamash. There were temples to them, as well as to the goddess Inanna/Ishtar, who was also THE END OF DAYS FIGURE 59