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14 one of the twelve supreme gods. It was the need to determine the exact time when each such month began and ended (and not in order to enable peasants to know when to sow or har- vest, as schoolbooks explain) that led to the introduction of Mankind’s first calendar in 3760 B.c.£. It is known as the Calendar of Nippur because it was the task of its priests to determine the calendar’s intricate timetable and to announce, for the whole land, the time of the religious festivals. That calendar is still in use to this day as the Jewish religious cal- endar, which, in A.p. 2007, numbers the year as 5767. In pre-Diluvial times Nippur served as Mission Control Center, Enlil’s command post where he set up the DUR.AN. KI, the “Bond Heaven-Earth” for the communications with the home planet Nibiru and with the spacecraft connecting them. (After the Deluge, these functions were relocated to a place later known as Jerusalem.) Its central position, equidis- tant from the other functional centers in the E.DIN (see Fig. 2), was also deemed to be equidistant from the “four corners of the Earth” and gave it the nickname “Navel of the Earth.” A hymn to Enlil referred to Nippur and its functions thus: Enlil, When you marked off divine settlements on Earth, Nippur you set up as your very own city... You founded the Dur-An-Ki In the center of the four corners of the Earth. (The term “the Four Corners of the Earth” is also found in the Bible; and when Jerusalem replaced Nippur as Mission Control Center after the Deluge, it too was nicknamed the Navel of the Earth.) In Sumerian the term for the four regions of the Earth was UB, but it also is found as AN.UB—the heavenly, the celestial four “corners”—in this case an astronomical term connected with the calendar. It is taken to refer to the four points in the Earth-Sun annual cycle that we nowadays call the Summer Solstice, the Winter Solstice, and the two cross- ings of the equator—once as the Spring Equinox and then as the Autumnal Equinox. In the Calendar of Nippur, the year THE END OF DAYS