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245 gamesh retorted with a long list of her lovers whom she befriended though she had "ordained for Tammuz [Dumuzi]. the lover of your youth, wailing year after year"; while still supposedly in mourning, he said, she acquired and discarded lovers "as a shoe which pinches the foot of its owner . . . as a door which does not keep out the wind . . . Which lover didst thou love forever?" he asked; "if thou shouldst make love to me, thou wouldst treat me like them." (The offended Inanna thereupon received Anu's _per- mission to launch against Gilgamesh the Bull of Heaven; Gilga- mesh was saved from it at the last moment at the gates of Erech). The golden era of Erech was not to last forever. Seven other kings followed Gilgamesh on its throne. Then, "Uruk was smitten with weapons: its kingship to Ur was carried." Thorkild Jacobsen, whose study The Sumerian King List is the most thorough on the subject, believes that the transfer of kingship in Sumer from Erech to Ur occurred circa 2850 B.C.; others adopt a lower date of circa 2650 B.C. (Such a discrepancy of two centuries has persisted into later times and remains unexplained by scholars.) The reigns of the various rulers were getting shorter and shorter as the site of kingship swung back and forth among Sumer's princi- pal cities: from Ur to Awan, then back to Kish; to a city named Hamazi, then back to Erech and Ur; to Adab and Mari, and back to Kish; to Aksak and again to Kish; and finally once more to Erech. In the course of no more than 220 years, there were thus three addi- tional dynasties at Kish, three at Erech, two at Ur, and single ones in five other cities. It was, by all appearances, a volatile period; it was also a time of increasing friction between the cities, mostly over water rights and irrigation canals—phenomena that can be ex- plained by drier weather on the one hand and rising populations on the other. In each instance the town that lost out was said to have been "smitten with weapons." Mankind had begun to wage its own wars! The resort to arms to settle local disputes was becoming more commonplace. Inscriptions from those days indicate that the ha- rassed populace was competing, through offerings and enhanced worship, for the favors of the gods; the warring city-states increas- ingly involved their patron-gods in their petty disputes. In one re- corded instance Ninurta was involved in determining whether an irrigation ditch encroached on another city's boundaries, Enlil, too, was forced to order the warring parties to disengage. This con- stant strife and lack of stability soon reached a point when the gods "A Queen Am I!"