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20 urban civilization began—the building of cities. It correctly notes (and explains) that in that land, where the soil consisted of layers of dried mud and there is no native rock, the people used mud bricks for building and by hardening the bricks in kilns could use them instead of stone. It also refers to the use of bitumen as mortar in construction—an astounding bit of information, since bitumen, a natural petroleum product, seeped up from the ground in southern Mesopotamia but was totally absent in the Land of Israel. The authors of this chapter in Genesis were thus well in- formed regarding the origins and key innovations of the Su- merian civilization; they also recognized the significance of the “Tower of Babel” incident. As in the tales of the creation of Adam and of the Deluge, they melded the various Sume- rian deities into the plural Elohim or into an all-encompass- ing and supreme Yahweh, but they left in the tale the fact that it took a group of deities to say, “let us come down” and put an end to this rogue effort (Genesis 11:7). Sumerian and later Babylonian records attest to the verac- ity of the biblical tale and contain many more details, linking the incident to the overall strained relationships between the gods that caused the outbreak of two “Pyramid Wars” after the Deluge. The “Peace on Earth” arrangements, circa 8650 B.C.E., left the erstwhile Edin in Enlilite hands. That con- formed to the decisions of Anu, Enlil, and even Enki—but was never acquiesced to by Marduk/Ra. And so it was that when Cities of Men began to be allocated in the former Edin to the gods, Marduk raised the issue, “What about me?” Although Sumer was the heartland of the Enlilite territo- ries and its cities were Enlilite “cult centers,” there was one exception: in the south of Sumer, at the edge of the marsh- lands, there was Eridu; it was rebuilt after the Deluge at the exact same site where Ea/Enki’s first settlement on Earth had been. It was Anu’s insistence, when the Earth was di- vided among the rival Anunnaki clans, that Enki forever re- tain Eridu as his own. Circa 3460 B.c.£. Marduk decided that he could extend his father’s privilege to also having his own foothold in the Enlilite heartland. The available texts do not provide the reason why Marduk THE END OF DAYS