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226 and went up to heaven; and the city and the people in it went to ruin. The sixteenth year of Nabupolassar was 610 B.C.E.—a memorable year, the reader may recall, when Babylonian forces captured Harran from the remnants of the Assyrian royal family and army, and when a reinvigorated Egypt de- cided to seize the space-related sites. It was then, Adda- Guppi wrote, that an angered Sin, removing his protection (and himself) from the city, packed up “and went up to heaven!” What followed in the captured city is accurately summed up: “And the city and its people went to ruin.” While other survivors fled, Adda-Guppi stayed on. “Daily, without ceas- ing, by day and night, for months, for years,” she kept vigil in the ruined temple. Mourning, she “forsook the dresses of fine wool, took off jewelry, wore neither silver nor gold, re- linquished perfumes and sweet smelling oils.” As a ghost roaming the abandoned shrine, “in a torn garment I was clothed; I came and went noiselessly,” she wrote. Then, in the desolate sacred precinct, she found a robe that had once belonged to Sin. To the despondent priestess, the find was an omen from the god: suddenly he had given her a physical presence of himself. She could not take her eyes off the sacred garb, not daring to touch it except by “taking hold of its hem.” As if the god himself was there to hear her, she prostrated herself and “in prayer and humility” uttered a vow: “If you would return to your city, all the Black-Headed people would worship your divinity!” “Black-Headed people” was a term by which the Sumeri- ans used to describe themselves, and the employment of the term by the high priestess some 1,500 years after Sumer was no more was full of significance: she was telling the god that were he to come back, he would be restored to lordship as in the Days of Old, become again the lord god of a restored Sumer and Akkad. To achieve that, Adda-Guppi offered her god a deal: If he would return and then use his divine powers to make her son Nabuna’id the next imperial king, reigning over all the Babylonian and Assyrian domains, Nabuna’id THE END OF DAYS