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232 and their populace. This suggests that those events had taken place after the Sumerian urban civilization had already begun circa 3800 B.C. On the other hand, the Egyptian background of the tales makes no reference to urban settlements and describes a_ pastoral environment, suggesting a time prior to 3100 B.C.. when urban civ- ilization in Egypt began. In the writings of Manetho a chaotic pe- riod of 350 years is said to have preceded the urban kingship of Menes. That period between 3450 and 3100 B.C. appears to have been the time of the troubles and tribulations triggered by Marduk: the Tower of Babel incident; and the Dumuzi affair, when a god of Egypt was captured and killed, when the Great God of Egypt was imprisoned and exiled. It was then, we believe, that the Anunnaki turned their attention to the Third Region of the Indus Valley, where civilization began soon thereafter. Unlike the Mesopotamian and Egyptian civilizations that lasted for millennia and continued, to this very day, through offspring civilizations, the one in the Third Region lasted only a millennium. Soon thereafter it began to decline, and by 1600 B.c. it was totally gone—its cities in ruins, its people dispersed. Human plunder and the ravages of nature gradually obliterated the civilization's re- mains; in time it was totally forgotten. It was only in the 1920s that archaeologists, led by Sir Mortimer Wheeler, began to unearth two principal centers and several sites in between, stretching over more than four hundred miles from the Indian Ocean coast northward, along the Indus River and its tributaries. Both sites—Mohenjo-Daro to the south and Harappa in the north—show that they were cities of substance, some three miles in circumference. High walls ran around and within the cities; these walls, as well as the public and private buildings, were all con- structed of bricks made of clay or mud. Originally there were so many of these bricks that in spite of constant ransacking by subse- quent home-builders both in ancient times as well as more recently for such purposes as ballast for the Lahore-Multan railroad, enough still remains standing to reveal the site of the cities and the fact that they were laid out in accordance with preconceived city building plans. At both sites the city was dominated by an acropolis—a raised area of citadels and temples. In both instances these structures were of the same measurements and similarly oriented exactly on a north-south axis—proving that their builders followed strict rules when it came to erecting the temples. In both cities the second larg- THE WARS OF GODS AND MEN