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24 was depicted on cylinder seals, on tablets dealing with as- tronomy, and in art. Some of the most beautiful art objects discovered in the Royal Tombs of Ur were bull heads sculpted in bronze, silver, and gold, adorned with semiprecious stones. Without doubt, the constellation of the Bull—Taurus— honored and symbolized Enlil. Its name, GUD.ANNA, meant “The Bull of Heaven,” and texts dealing with an ac- tual “Bull of Heaven” linked Enlil and his constellation to one of the most unique places on Earth. It was a place that was called The Landing Place—and it is there that one of the most amazing structures on Earth, including a stone tower that reaches to the heay- ens, still stands. Many texts from antiquity, including the Hebrew Bible, describe or refer to the unique forest of tall and great cedar trees in Lebanon. In ancient times it extended for miles, sur- rounding the unique place—a vast stone platform built by the gods as their first space-related site on Earth, before their centers and real spaceport were established. It was, Su- merian texts attested, the only structure that had survived the Deluge, and could thus serve right after the Deluge as a base of operations for the Anunnaki; from it they revived the rav- ished lands with crops and domesticated animals. The place, called the “Landing Place” in the Epic of Gilgamesh, was that king’s destination in his search for immortality; we learn from the epic tale that it was there, in the sacred cedar forest, that Enlil kept the GUD.ANNA—the “Bull of Heaven,” the symbol of Enlil’s Age of the Bull. And what happened then in the sacred forest had a bearing on the course of the affairs of gods and men. The journey to the Cedar Forest and its Landing Place, we learn from the epic tale, began in Uruk, the city that Anu granted as a present to his great-granddaughter Inanna (a name that meant “Beloved of Anu”). Its king, early in the third millennium B.c.E., was Gilgamesh (Fig. 12). He was no ordinary man, for his mother was the goddess Ninsun, a member of Enlil’s family. That made Gilgamesh not a mere demi-god, but one who was “two-thirds divine.” As he got older and began to contemplate matters of life and death, it THE END OF DAYS