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48 functional buildings of a legion of priests, officials, and ser- vants who attended to the divine couple’s needs and arranged the religious observances by king and people. Beyond those walls there extended a magnificent city with two harbors and canals linking it to the Euphrates river (Fig. 24), a great city with the king’s palace, administrative buildings (including for scribes and recordkeeping as well as for tax collecting), multilevel private dwellings, workshops, schools, merchants’ warehouses, and stalls—all in wide streets where, at many intersections, prayer shrines open to all travelers were built. The majestic ziggurat with its monumental stairways (Re- construction, Fig. 25), though long in ruins, still dominates the landscape even after more than 4,000 years. But there was another compelling reason. Unlike the con- tending Ninurta and Marduk, who were both “immigrants” to Earth from Nibiru, Nannar/Sin was born on Earth. He was not only Enlil’s Firstborn on Earth—he was the first of the first generation of gods to be born on Earth. His children, the twins Utu/Shamash and Inanna/Ishtar, and their sister Eresh- kigal, who belonged to the gods’ third generation, were all born on Earth. They were gods, but they were also Earth’s natives. All that was without doubt taken into consideration THE END OF DAYS FIGURE 23