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73 being offered to him in marriage—a step that suggsts that a treaty was discussed. That such high level international ne- gotiations were taking place between Abram and the Egyp- tian king seems plausible when one realizes that the year when Abram returned to the Negev after a seven-year stay in Egypt—2040 B.c.E.—was the very same year in which the Theban princes of Upper Egypt defeated the previous Lower Egypt dynasty, launching Egypt’s unified Middle Kingdom. Another geopolitical coincidence! Abram, now reinforced with manpower and camels, re- turned to the Negev in the nick of time, his mission now clear: to defend the Fourth Region with its spaceport. As the biblical narrative reveals, he now had with him an elite force of Ne’arim—a term usually translated “Young Men”—but Mesopotamian texts used the parallel term LU.NAR (“NAR- men”) to denote armed cavalrymen. It is my suggestion that Abraham, having learnt in Harran tactics from the militarily excelling Hittites, obtained in Egypt a striking force of swift camel-riding cavalrymen. His base in Canaan was again the Negev, the area bordering the Sinai Peninsula. He did so in the nick of time, for a mighty army—legions of an alliance of Enlilite kings—was on its way not only to crush and punish the “sinning cities” that switched allegiance to “other gods,” but to also capture the spaceport. The Sumerian texts dealing with the reign of Amar-Sin, Shulgi’s son and successor, inform us that in 2041 B.c.£. he launched his greatest (and last) military expedition against the Lands of the West that fell under the Marduk-Nabu spell. It entailed an invasion of unparalleled scope by an interna- tional alliance, in which not only cities of men but also strongholds of gods and their offspring were attacked. It was, indeed, such a major and unparalleled occurrence that the Bible devoted a whole long chapter to it—Genesis, Chapter 14. Biblical scholars call it “The War of the Kings,” for it climaxed in a great battle between an army of four “Kings of the East” and the combined forces of five “Kings of the West,” and culminated in a remarkable military feat by Abraham’s swift cavalrymen. Countdown to Doomsday