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102 Fig. 27 millennia. Realizing that this would be so, Anu and Enlil provided Ninurta with new, marvelous weapons. Anu gave him the SHAR.UR ("Supreme Hunter") and the SHAR.GAZ ("Supreme Smiter"); Enlil gave him several weapons, of which the unique IB—a weapon with "fifty killing heads"—-was the most awesome, lead- ing to references in the chronicles to Ninurta as "The Lord of the Ib." Thus armed, Ninurta became the "Foremost Warrior of En- lil," ready to fight off all challenges to the Enlilship. The next such challenge came in the shape of a mutiny of the Anunnaki who were working in the gold mines of the Abzu. The mutiny, and the events that had led to it and followed it, are fully described in a text called by scholars The Atra-Hasis Epic—a full- fledged Earth Chronicle which, inter alia, records the events that had led to the creation of Homo sapiens—Man as we know him. The text informs us that after Anu had gone back to Nibiru and Earth was divided between Enlil and Enki, the Anunnaki toiled in the mines of the Abzu for "forty counted periods"—forty orbits of their planet, or 144,000 Earth-years. But the work was diffi- THE WARS OF GODS AND MEN