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225 ended up residing there because his father Terah was a Tirhu, an omen-priest, first in Nippur, then in Ur, and finally in Nannar/Sin’s temple in Harran. After the demise of Sumer by the nuclear Evil Wind, Nannar and his spouse, Ningal, made their home and headquarters in Harran. Though Nannar (“Su-en,” or Sin for short in Akkadian) was not Enlil’s firstborn legal heir—that rank belonged to Ninurta—he was the firstborn of Enlil and his spouse Ninlil, a firstborn on Earth. Gods and men greatly adored Nannar/ Sin and his spouse; the hymns in their honor in Sumer’s glo- rious times, and the lamentations about the desolation of Sumer in general and Ur in particular, reveal the great love and admiration of the people for this divine couple. That many centuries later Esarhaddon went to consult with an ag- ing Sin (“leaning on a staff”) regarding the invasion of Egypt, and that the escaping Assyrian royals made a last stand in Harran, serve to indicate the continued important role played by Nannar/Sin and Harran to the very end. It was in the ruins of the city’s great Nannar/Sin temple, the E.HUL.HUL (“House of Double Joy”), that archaeolo- gists discovered four stone columns (“stelae”) that once stood in the temple, one at each corner of the main prayer hall. The inscriptions on the stelae revealed that two were erected by the temple’s high priestess, Adda-Guppi, and two by her son Nabuna’id, the last king of Babylon. With an evident sense of history and as a trained temple official, Adda-Guppi provided in her inscriptions precise dates for the astounding events that she had witnessed. The dates, linked as was then customary to regnal years of known kings, could thus be—and have been—verified by modern scholars. It is thus certain that she was born in 649 B.c.£. and lived through the reigns of several Assyrian and Babylonian kings, passing on at the ripe old age of 104. Here is what she wrote on her stela concerning the first of a series of amazing events: It was in the sixteenth year of Nabupolassar, king of Babylon, when Sin, lord of the gods, became angry with his city and his temple When the Gods Left Earth