Page Content (OCR)
31 tion of her enemies, actively assisting him on the battlefields. Depictions of her, which used to show her as an enticing god- dess of love, now showed her as a goddess of war, bristling with weapons (Fig. 16). It was warfare not without a plan—a plan to counter Mar- duk’s ambitions by capturing all the space-related sites in be- half of Inanna/Ishtar. The lists of cities captured or subdued by Naram-Sin indicate that he not only reached the Mediter- ranean Sea—assuring control of the Landing Place—but also turned southward to invade Egypt. Such an incursion into the Enki’ite domains was unprecedented, and it could take place, a careful reading of the records reveals, because Inanna/Ishtar had formed an unholy alliance with Nergal, Marduk’s brother who espoused Inanna’s sister. The thrust into Egypt also re- quired entering and crossing the neutral Sacred Region in the Sinai Peninsula, where the spaceport was located—another breach of the olden Peace Treaty. Boastful, Naram-Sin gave himself the title “King of the four regions” . . . We can hear the protests of Enki. We can read texts that re- cord Marduk’s warnings. It was all more than even the Enlilite leadership could condone. A long text known as The Curse of Aggade, which tells the story of the Akkadian dynasty, clearly states that its end came about “after the frowning of the fore- head of Enlil”’ And so the “word of Ekur’—the decision of Enlil from his temple in Nippur—was to put an end to it: “The word of the Ekur was upon Aggade” to be destroyed and “And It Came to Pass” FIGURE 16