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21 chose that specific site on the banks of the Euphrates river for his new headquarters, but its location provides a clue: it was situated between the rebuilt Nippur (the pre-Diluvial Mission Control Center) and the rebuilt Sippar (the pre-Diluvial space- port of the Anunnaki), so what Marduk had in mind could have been a facility that served both functions. A later map of Baby- lon, drawn on a clay tablet (Fig. 10) represents it as a “Navel of the Earth’—akin to Nippur’s original function-title. The name Marduk gave the place, Bab-Ili in Akkadian, meant “Gateway of the gods’”—a place from which the gods could ascend and descend, where the appropriate main facility was to be a “tower whose head shall reach the heavens”—a launch tower! As in the biblical tale, so it is told in parallel (and earlier) Mesopotamian versions that this attempt to establish a rogue “And It Came to Pass” FIGURE 10