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10 commemorated the battle scenes on temple walls (Fig. 3). He at- tributed his victories to his strict adherence to "the plans of the All- Lord, my august divine father, the Lord of the Gods." It was to his god Amon-Ra, Ramses wrote, that the credit for the victories was due: for it was "Amon-Ra who was after them, destroying them." Ae $f 8 i + AG Fen (atin 'sh Fig. 3 The bloody trail of man's war against his fellow men in behalf of the gods now takes us back to Mesopotamia—the Land Between the Rivers (Euphrates and Tigris)—the biblical Land of Shin‘ar. There, as is related in Genesis 11, the first-ever cities arose, with buildings made with bricks and towers that scraped the skies. It was there that recorded history began; it was there that prehistory began with the settlements of the Olden Gods. It is a tale of long ago, which we will soon unfold. But right now let us return to a thousand years before the dramatic times of Ram- ses Il in Egypt. Then, in faraway Mesopotamia, kingship was taken over by an ambitious young man. He was called Sharru- Kin—"Righteous Ruler": our textbooks call him Sargon the First. He built a new capital city, calling it Agade, and established the kingdom of Akkad. The Akkadian language, written in a wedge- like (cuneiform) script, was the mother tongue of all the Semitic languages, of which Hebrew and Arabic are still in use. Reigning for the better part of the twenty-fourth century B.C., Sargon attributed his long reign (fifty-four years) to the special sta- tus granted him by the Great Gods, who made him "Overseer of Ishtar. Anointed Priest of ANU. Great Righteous Shepherd of ENLIL." It was Enlil, Sargon wrote, "who did not let anybody oppose Sargon" and who gave Sargon "the region from the Upper Sea to the Lower Sea" (from the Mediterranean to the Persian THE WARS OF GODS AND MEN