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320 Soon thereafter—February 2031 B.c. by our calendar—the Near East was awed by a total lunar eclipse, which blacked out the moon during the night tor its full course from horizon to horizon. The or- acle priests of Nippur could not allay Shu-Sin's anxiety: It was. they said in their written message, an omen "to the king who rules the four regions: his wall will be destroyed. Ur will become deso- late." Rejected by the great olden gods. Shu-Sin engaged in one final act—either out of defiance or as a last straw to gain divine support. He went ahead and built—in the very sacred precinct of Nippur—a shrine to a young god named Shara. He was a son of Inanna; and like Lugalbanda. who bore this epithet in earlier days, so was this new Shara ("Prince") a son of a king; in the inscription dedicating the temple. Shu-Sin claimed that he was the young god's father: "To divine Shara. heavenly hero, the beloved son of Inanna: His father Shu-Sin. the powerful king, king of Ur. king of the four re- gions, has built for him the temple Shagipada. his beloved shrine; may the king have life." It was the ninth year of Shu-Sin's reign. It was also his last. The new ruler on the throne of Ur, Ibbi-Sin, could not stop the retreat and retrenchment. All he could do was rush the construction of walls and fortifications in the heart of Sumer, around Ur and Nippur; the rest of the country was left unprotected. His own date formulas, of which none have been found beyond his fifth year (al- though he reigned longer), tell little of the circumstances of his days; much more is learned from the cessation of other customary messages and trade documents. Thus, the messages of loyalty, which the other subordinate urban centers were expected to send to Ur each year, ceased to arrive from one center after the other. First to cease were the loyalty messages from the western districts: then, in the third year, the capitals of eastern provinces stopped their dis- patch. In that third year Ur's foreign commerce "stopped with a significant suddenness" (in the words of C. J. Gadd, History and Monuments of Ur). At the tax collection crossroads of Drehem (near Nippur), where shipments of goods and cattle and the collec- tion of taxes thereon were recorded throughout the Third Dynasty of Ur—trecords of which thousands of intact clay tablets were found—the meticulous account-keeping also stopped abruptly in that third year. Ignoring Nippur, whose great gods had left her, Ibbi-Sin put his trust again in Nannar and Inanna, installing himself in his second year as High Priest of Inanna's temple in Uruk. Repeatedly he THE WARS OF CODS AND MEN