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44 constellation the Sun was appearing. And that—determining the zodiacal age through precise observation—was the prime objective of the whole complex facility. In Stonehenge, that sight line ran (and still runs) from the stone column called the Altar Stone in the center, through two stone columns identified as Sarsen Stones numbers | and 30, then down the Avenue to the so-called Heel Stone (see Fig. 6). It is generally agreed that the Stonehenge with the double Bluestone Circle and the Heel Stone of what is designated Stonehenge II dates to between 2200 to 2100 B.c.E. That was also the time—perhaps more accurately, in 2160 B.c.E.—when the “Stonehenge on the Euphrates” was built. And that was no chance coincidence. Like those two zo- diacal observatories, other stone observatories proliferated at the same time in other places on Earth—at various sites in Europe, in South America, on the Golan Heights northeast of Israel, even in faraway China (where archaeologists discov- ered in the Shanzi province a stone circle with thirteen pil- lars aligned to the zodiac and dating to 2100 B.c.E.). They were all deliberate countermoves by Ninurta and Ningish- zidda to Marduk’s Divine Chess Game: to show Mankind that the zodiacal age was still the Age of the Bull. Various texts from that time, including an autobiographical text by Marduk and a longer text known as the Erra Epos, shed light on Marduk’s wanderings away from Egypt, mak- ing him there the Hidden One. They also reveal that his de- mands and actions assumed an urgency and ferocity because of a conviction that his time for supremacy has come. The Heavens bespeak my glory as Lord, was his claim. Why? Because, he announced, the Age of the Bull, the Age of En- lil, was over; the Age of the Ram, Marduk’s zodiacal age, has arrived. It was, just as Ninurta had told Gudea, the time when in the heavens destinies on Earth were determined. The zodiacal ages, it will be recalled, were caused by the phenomenon of Precession, the retardation in Earth’s orbit around the Sun. The retardation accumulates to 1 degree (out of 360) in 72 years; an arbitrary division of the grand circle THE END OF DAYS