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29 This absence, together with the Bull of Heaven incident, ushered in a period of instability and confusion in their Mes- opotamian heartland, subjecting it to incursions from neigh- boring lands. People called Gutians, then the Elamites came from the East; Semitic-speaking peoples came from the West. But while the Easterners worshipped the same Enlilite gods as the Sumerians, the Amurru (“Westerners”) were dif- ferent. Along the shores of the “Upper Sea” (the Mediter- ranean), in the lands of the Canaanites, the people were beholden to the Enki’ite gods of Egypt. Therein lay the seeds—perhaps to this day—of Holy Wars undertaken “Jn the Name of God,” except that different peo- ples had different national gods . . . It was Inanna who came up with a brilliant idea; it can be described as “if you can’t fight them, invite them in.” One day, as she was roaming the skies in her Sky Chamber—it happened circa 2360 B.c.E.—she landed in a garden next to a sleeping man who had caught her fancy. She liked the sex, she liked the man. He was a Westerner, speaking a Semitic language. As he wrote later in his memoirs, he knew not who his father was, but knew that his mother was an Entu, a god’s priestess, who put him in a reed basket that was carried by the river’s flowing waters to a garden tended by Akki the Ir- rigator, who raised him as a son. The possibility that the strong and handsome man could have been a god’s castoff son was enough for Inanna to rec- ommend to the other gods that the next king of the land should be this Amurru. When they agreed, she granted him the epithet-name Sharru-kin, the old cherished title of Su- merian kings. Not stemming from the previous recognized royal Sumerian lineages, he could not ascend the throne in any one of the olden capitals, and a brand-new city was es- tablished to serve as his capital. It was called Aggade— “Union City.” Our textbooks call this king Sargon of Akkad and his Semitic language Akkadian. His kingdom, which added northern and northwestern provinces to ancient Sumer, was called Sumer & Akkad. Sargon lost little time in carrying out the mission for which he was selected—to bring the “rebel lands” under control. “And It Came to Pass”