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89 The historical records show that the Sumerian civilization collapsed in the sixth year of the reign in Ur of Ibbi-Sin— in 2024 B.c.£. It was, the reader will recall, the very year in which Abraham was ninety-nine years old... Scholars assumed at first that Sumer’s capital, Ur, was overrun by “barbarian invaders”; but no evidence for such a destructive invasion was found. A text titled “A Lamentation Over the Destruction of Ur” was then discovered; it puzzled the scholars, for it bewailed not the physical destruction of Ur but its “abandonment”: the gods who had dwelt there abandoned it, the people who dwelt there were gone, its sta- bles were empty; the temples, the houses, the sheepfolds re- mained intact—standing, but empty. Other lamentation texts were then discovered. They la- mented not just Ur, but all of Sumer. Again they spoke of “abandonment”: not only did the gods of Ur, Nannar, and Ningal abandon Ur; Enlil, “the wild bull,” abandoned his be- loved temple in Nippur; his spouse Ninlil was also gone. Ninmah abandoned her city Kesh; Inanna, “the queen of Erech,” abandoned Erech; Ninurta forsook his temple Eninnu; his spouse Bau was also gone from Lagash. One Sumerian city after another was listed as having been “abandoned,” without their gods, people, or animals. The scholars were now puzzling over some “dire catastrophe,” a mysterious ca- lamity that affected the whole of Sumer. What could it be? The answer to the puzzle was right there in those texts: Gone with the wind. No, this is not a play of words on the title of a famous book/ movie. That was the refrain in the Lamentation Texts: Enlil has abandoned his temple, he was “gone by the wind.” Ninlil from her temple was “gone by the wind.” Nannar has aban- doned Ur—his sheepfolds were “gone by the wind”; and so on and on. The scholars have assumed that this repetition of the words was a literary device, a refrain that the lamenters re- peated over and over again to highlight their grief. But that was no literary device—that was the literal truth: Sumer and its cities were literally emptied as a result of a wind. An “Evil Wind,’ the lamentation (and then other texts) re- ported, came blowing and caused “a calamity, one unknown Gone with the Wind