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12 Hold back your boldness, stay at home! Together with your wife, in bed go sleep. but with her you must not. . . Out of your land, unto the enemy, you must not go." But Naram-Sin. announcing that he would rely on his own weap- ons, decided to attack the enemy in spite of the gods' advice. "When the first year arrived, I sent out 120,000 troops, but none of them returned alive," Naram-Sin confessed in his inscription. More troops were annihilated in the second and third years, and Akkad was succumbing to death and hunger. On the fourth anni- versary of the unauthorized war, Naram-Sin appealed to the great god Ea to overrule Ishtar and put his case before the other gods. They advised him to desist from further fighting, promising that "in days to come, Enlil will summon perdition upon the Sons of Evil," and Akkad would have respite. The promised era of peace lasted about three centuries, during which the olden part of Mesopotamia. Sumer, reemerged as the center of kingship, and the oldest urban centers of the ancient world —wUr, Nippur, Lagash, Isin, Larsa—flourished again. Sumer, un- der the kings of Ur, was the center of an empire that encompassed the whole of the ancient Near East. But toward the end of the third millennium B.C., the land became the arena for contending loyalties and opposing armies; and then that great civilization—man's first known civilization—succumbed to a major catastrophe of unprece- Anns - dented proportions. It was a fateful event which, we believe, was echoed in biblical tales. It was an event whose memory lingered on for a long time, oe or ian a a os wen Tn commemorated and bewailed in numerous lamentation poems; they gave a very graphic description of the havoc and desolation that befell that great heartland of ancient civilization. It was, those Mesopotamian texts stated, a catastrophe that befell Sumer as a re- sult of a decision of the great gods sitting in council. It took southern Mesopotamia almost a century to be resettled and another century to fully recover from the divine annihilation. By then, the center of Mesopotamian power had shifted northward, to Babylon. There, a new empire was to rise, proclaiming an ambi- tious god. MARDUK, as its supreme deity. Circa 1800 B.C.. Hammurabi, the king renowned for his law code, ascended the throne in Babylon and began to extend its boundaries. According to his inscriptions the gods not only told THE WARS OF GODS AND MEN