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220 get up empty-handed; Take the holy sandals off your feet, get up barefooted! The seized Dumuzi manages to escape and reaches the river "at the great dike in the desert of EMUSH ("Home of the snakes"). There was only one such place in Egypt, where desert and river met at a great dike: at the first Nile Cataract, the place where nowa- days the great dam of Aswan is located. But the swirling waters did not let Dumuzi reach the other riverbank where his mother and Inanna were standing by to offer him protection. Instead "there did the boat-wrecking waters carry the lad towards Kur; to Kur did the boat-wrecking waters carry the espoused of Inanna." This and other parallel texts reveal that those who had come to seize Dumuzi were in fact arresting him in accordance with the or- ders given by a higher god, the Master of Kur, who "a sentence did pass upon him." But it could not have been a sentence passed by the full Assembly of the gods: Enlilite gods, such as Utu/Shamash and Inanna, were helping Dumuzi escape. The sentence, then, was one-sided, passed only by the authority of the master of the arrest- ing deputies. He was none other than Marduk, the elder brother of both Dumuzi and Geshtinanna. His identity comes through in the text named by scholars "The Myths of Inanna and Bilulu." In it the shady Old Belili turns out to have been a male, the Lord Bilulu (EN.BILULU) in disguise, and the very deity who directed the punitive action against Dumuzi. Akkadian texts dealing with divine epithets explained that En- Bilulu was il Marduk sha hattati, "the god Marduk who had sinned," and "The Sorrower of Inanna." Having disapproved of the Dumuzi-Inanna love match from the beginning, Marduk no doubt was even more opposed to the union after the Pyramid Wars. The rape of Geshtinanna by Dumuzi— politically motivated—was thus an opportunity for Marduk to block the designs Inanna had on Egypt, by seizing and punishing Dumuzi. Did Marduk intend to put Dumuzi to death? Probably not; solitary exile was the customary punishment. The death of Dumuzi, in a manner that has remained unclear, was probably ac- cidental. THE WARS OF GODS AND MEN Lay aside the divine staff which is in your hand, But whether accidental or not was irrelevant to Inanna. As far as