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13 with other brothers and half-brothers of his, in addition to the conflict with Thoth that we have already mentioned—princi- pally with Enki’s son Nergal, who married a granddaughter of Enlil named Ereshkigal. In the course of these struggles, the conflicts at times flared up to full-fledged wars between the two divine clans; some of those wars are called “The Pyramid Wars” in my book The Wars of Gods and Men. In one notable instance the fighting led to the burying alive of Marduk inside the Great Pyramid; in another, it led to its capture by Ninurta. Marduk was also exiled more than once—both as punishment and as a self-imposed absence. His persistent efforts to attain the status to which he believed he was entitled included the event recorded in the Bible as the Tower of Babel incident; but in the end, after numerous frustrations, success came only when Earth and Heaven were aligned with the Messianic Clock. Indeed, the first cataclysmic set of events, in the twenty- first century B.C.E., and the Messianic expectations that ac- companied it, is principally the story of Marduk; it also brought to center stage his son Nabu—a deity, the son of a god, but whose mother was an Earthling. Throughout the history of Sumer that spanned almost two thousand years, its royal capital shifted—from the first one, Kish (Ninurta’s first city), to Uruk (the city that Anu granted to Inanna/Ishtar) to Ur (Sin’s seat and center of worship); then to others and then back to the initial ones; and finally, for the third time, back to Ur. But at all times Enlil’s city Nippur, his “cult center,’ as scholars are wont to call it, re- mained the religious center of Sumer and the Sumerian peo- ple; it was there that the annual cycle of worshipping the gods was determined. The twelve “Olympians” of the Sumerian pantheon, each with his or her celestial counterpart among the twelve mem- bers of the Solar System (Sun, Moon, and ten planets, includ- ing Nibiru), were also honored with one month each in the annual cycle of a twelve-month year. The Sumerian term for “month,” EZEN, actually meant holiday, festival; and each such month was devoted to celebrating the worship-festival of The Messianic Clock