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101 Thy name shall be the greatest in the Assembly of the Great Gods; Among the gods, thy brothers, thou shall have no equal; Glorified before the gods and potent shall be thy name! After Ninurta's victory the promise had to be kept. Bui therein was the rub and the seed of future fights among the gods: Ninurta was indeed Enlil's Legal Heir but on Nibiru, not on Earth. Now, as the commemorative temple ritual makes clear, he was made "as Enlil—upon Earth." We know from other texts dealing with the gods of Sumer and Akkad that their hierarchical order was also ex- pressed numerically. Anu was given the highest number of the Su- merian sexagesimal system, 60. His Legal Heir, Enlil, had the rank of 50; the firstborn son (and heir in the event of Enlil's demise), Ea, was 40. Now, as the enigmatic statement that Ninurta has become "as Enlil" attests, he, too, was given the rank of 50. The partly mutilated ending of the temple ritual text contains the following legible verses: "O Marduk, for your king speak the words: 'I release!' O Adad, for your king speak the words: 'I re- lease!’ "We can safely guess that the mutilated lines also included a similar release by Sin of his claim to kingship among the gods and recognition of Ninurta's Enlilship. We know that thereafter, Sin —Fnlil's firstborn on Earth—held the rank of 30, his son Shamash 20, and his daughter Ishtar 15, and Ishkur (Adad in Akkadian) the rank of 10. (There is no record of Marduk's numerical rank.) The conspiracy of Zu and his evil plotting remained also in man- kind's memory, evolving into a fear of birdlike demons who can cause affliction and pestilence (Fig. 27). Some of these demons were called Lillu, a term that played on the double meaning "to howl" and "of the night"; their female leader, Lillitu—Lilith— was depicted as a naked, winged goddess with birdlike feet (Fig. 28). The many shurpu ("purification by burning") texts that have been found were formulas for incantations against these evil spirits—forerunners of the sorcery and witchcraft that had lasted throughout the millennia. and respect Enlil's supremacy and Ninurta's position as second-in- command, the basic factors causing rivalry and contention had remained—breaking into the open from time to time in the ensuing The Wars of the Olden Gods In spite of the solemn vows taken after the defeat of Zu to honor