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268 The stay of Ningishzidda in Sumer and his collaboration there with Ninurta were commemorated not only in shrines to that visit- ing god, but also in numerous artistic depictions, some of which were discovered during the sixty years of archaeological work at Tello. One of these (Fig. 89a) combined the emblem of Ninurta's Divine Bird with the serpents of Ningishzidda; another (Fig. 89b) depicted Ninurta as an Egyptian Sphinx. Fig. 89 The time of Gudea and the Ninurta-Ningishzidda collaboration coincides with the so-called First Intermediate Period in Egypt, when the kings of the IX and X dynasties (2160 to 2040 B.C.) aban- doned the worship of Osiris and Horus and moved the capital from Memphis to a city the Greeks later called Heracleopolis. The de- parture of Thoth from Egypt may thus have been an aspect of the upheavals occurring there, as was his subsequent disappearance from Sumer. Ningishzidda (to quote E. D. van Buren, The God Ningizzida) was "a god called forth from obscurity in Gudea's THE WARS OF GODS AND MEN