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65 ters in marriage and the Sumerian city Larsa as dowry. A major military expedition, employing those Elamite troops, was launched against the “sinning cities” in the west; the troops reached the Fortified Place of the gods at the Fourth Region’s boundary. Shulgi in his inscriptions boasted of vic- tory, but in fact, soon thereafter, he started to build a forti- fied wall to protect Sumer against foreign incursions from the west and from the northwest. The Date Formulas called it the Great West Wall, and scholars believe that it ran from the Euphrates to the Tigris rivers north of where Baghdad is situated nowadays, block- ing to invaders the way down the fertile plain between the two rivers. It was a defensive measure that preceded the Great Wall of China, which was built for similar reasons, by almost two thousand years! In 2048 B.c.£. the gods, led by Enlil, had enough of Shul- gi’s state failures and personal dolce vita. Determining that “the divine regulations he did not carry out,” they decreed for him “the death of a sinner.” We don’t know what kind of death it was, but it is a historic fact that in that year he was replaced on the throne of Ur by his son Amar-Sin, of whom we know from the inscriptions that he launched one military expedition after another—to quell a revolt in the north, to fight an alliance of five kings in the west. As in so much else, what was happening had root causes going back, sometimes way back, to earlier times and events. The “rebel lands,” though in Asia and thus domains in the Enlilite Lands of Noah’s son Shem, were inhabited by varied “Canaanites”—offspring of the biblical Canaan who, though descended of Ham (and thus belonging to Africa), occupied a stretch of Shem’s lands (Genesis, Chapter 10). That the “Lands of the West” along the Mediterranean coast were somehow disputed territory was also indicated by ancient Egyptian texts regarding the bitter contest between Horus and Seth that ended in aerial battles between them over the Sinai and the same contested lands. It is noteworthy that in their military expeditions to sub- due and punish the “rebel lands” in the west, both UrrNammu and Shulgi reached the Sinai peninsula, but turned away Countdown to Doomsday