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272 ment center of the ancient Near East: and developed a foreign trade by land and water that made the merchants of Ur remembered for millennia thereafter. To service this thriving trade and the far-flung links, as well as to improve the city's defenses, the city's surround- ing wall was in turn surrounded by a navigable canal, serving two harbors—a West Harbor and a North Harbor—with an inner canal connecting the two harbors and in turn separating the sacred pre- cinct and the palace and administrative quarter from the residential and commercial parts of the city (Fig. 92). It was a city whose white houses—many of them multistoried (Fig. 93)—shined as a pearl from a distance; whose streets were straight and wide, with many a shrine at their intersections: a city of an industrious people with a smooth-functioning administration; a city of pious people, never failing to pray to their benevolent deities. The first ruler of the Third Dynasty of Ur. Ur-Nammu ("The Joy of Ur") was no mere mortal: he was semi-divine, his mother being the goddess Ninsun. His extensive records state that as soon as "Anu and Enlil had turned over kingship to Nannarat Ur," and Ur-Nammu was selected to be the "Righteous Shepherd" of the people, the gods ordered Ur-Nammu to institute a new moral re- vival. The nearly three centuries that had passed since the moral re- vival under Urukagina of Lagash witnessed the rise and fall of Akkad, the defying of the authority of Anu, and the defilement of Enlil's Ekur. Injustice, oppression, and immorality had become the common behavior. At Ur, under Ur-Nammu. an attempt was launched once again by Enlil to steer mankind away from "evil ways" to a course of "righteousness." Proclaiming a new code of justice and social behavior. Ur-Nammu "established equity in the land, banished malediction, ended violence and strife." Expecting so much from this New Beginning, Enlil—for the first time—entrusted the guardianship of Nippur to Nannar and gave Ur-Nammu the necessary instructions for the restoration of the Ekur (which was damaged by Naram-Sin). Ur-Nammu marked the occasion by erecting a stela, showing him carrying the tools and basket of a builder (Fig. 94). When the work was completed, Enlil and Ninlil returned to Nippur to reside in their restored abode. "Enlil and Ninlil were happy there," a Sumerian inscription stated. The Return-to-Righteous-Ways involved not only social justice among people, but also proper worship of the gods. To that effect Ur-Nammu, in addition to the great works in Ur, also restored and enlarged the edifices dedicated to Anu and Inanna at Erech, to THE WARS OF GODS AND MEN