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237 assigned a pilot-navigator for the more demanding flights. As the Vedas, which spoke of pilots of the gods (one, Pushan. "guided Indra through the speckled clouds" in the "golden ship that travels in the air's mid-region"), so did the earlier Sumerian texts refer to the AB.GALs, who ferried the gods across the heavens. Inanna's _pilot- navigator, we are told, was Nungal; and he was specifically named in regard to her transfer to the House of Anu in Erech: Fig. 75 Nungal, the lion-hearted, was the Pilot who from the skies brought Ishtar down anki An According to the Sumerian King Lists, kingship after the Deluge began at Kish. Then, "the Kingship to the Eanna was carried." As archaeologists have confirmed, Erech indeed had its beginnings as a temple city, consisting of the sacred precinct where Anu's first modest shrine ("White Temple") was built atop a raised platform (Fig. 76); the site remained in the city's heart even as Erech grew and its temples were aggrandized, as the remains of the city and its walls indicate (Fig. 77). Archaeologists have come upon the remains of a magnificent temple dedicated to Inanna and dating to the early part of the third millennium B.C.—possibly the very temple constructed by Enmer- "A Queen Am I!" At the time when Enmerkar in Uruk ruled, to the E-Anna.