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253 in Ur should also be rebuilt and become the center of worship; and in Babylon, the priests of Marduk were up in arms. A tablet now in the British Museum is inscribed with a text that scholars have titled Nabunaid and the Clergy of Baby- Jon. It contains a list of accusations by the Babylonian priests against Nabunaid. The charges ran from civil matters (“law and order are not promulgated by him’), through neglect of the economy (“the farmers are corrupted,” “the traders’ roads are blocked”), and lack of public safety (“nobles are killed”), to the most serious charges: religious sacrilege— He made an image of a god which nobody had seen before in the land. He placed it in the temple, raised it upon a pedestal, He called it by the name of Nannar, with lapis lazuli he adorned it, Crowned it with a tiara in the shape of an eclipsed moon, Made for its hand the gesture of a demon. It was, the accusations continued, a strange statue of a de- ity, never seen before, “with hair reaching down to the pedes- tal.” It was so unusual and unseemly, the priests wrote, that even Enki and Ninmah (who ended up with strange chimera creatures when they attempted to fashion Man) “could not have conceived it”; it was so strange that “not even the learned Adapa”—an icon of utmost human knowledge—“could have named it.” To make matters worse, two unusual beasts were sculpted as its guardians—one a “Deluge demon” and the other a wild bull; then the king took this abomination and placed it in Marduk’s Esagil temple. Even more offending was Nabunaid’s announcment that henceforth the Akitu festi- val, during which the near-death, resurrection, exile, and fi- nal triumph of Marduk were reenacted, would no longer be celebrated. Declaring that Nabunaid’s “protective god became hostile to him” and that “the former favorite of the gods was now fated to misfortune,” the Babylonian priests forced Nabunaid The End of Days