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28 the craftsmen, the armorers, the artisans” of Uruk to ad- mire the bull’s horns. The text suggets that they were artifi- cially made—“each is cast from thirty minas of lapis, the coating on each is two fingers thick.” Until another tablet with the illegible lines is discovered, we shall not know for sure whether Enlil’s celestial symbol in the cedar forest was a specially selected living bull deco- rated and embellished with gold and precious stones or a ro- botic creature, an artificial monster. What we do know for certain is that upon its slaying, “Ishtar, in her abode, set up a wail” all the way to Anu in the heavens. The matter was so serious that Anu, Enlil, Enki, and Shamash formed a divine council to judge the comrades (only Enkidu ended up being punished) and to consider the slaying’s consequences. The ambitious Inanna/Ishtar had indeed reason to raise a wail: the invincibility of Enlil’s Age had been pierced, and the Age itself was symbolically shortened by the cutting off of the bull’s thigh. We know from Egyptian sources, including picto- rial depictions in astronomical papyri (Fig. 15), that the slay- ing’s symbolism was not lost on Marduk: it was taken to mean that in the heavens, too, the Age of Enlil had been cut short. Marduk’s attempt to establish an alternative space facility was not taken lightly by the Enlilites; the evidence suggests that Enlil and Ninurta were preoccupied with establishing their own alternative space facility on the other side of the Earth, in the Americas, near the post-Diluvial sources of gold. THE END OF DAYS FIGURE 15