Page Content (OCR)
329 The plain by the Mount Most Supreme he then obliterated; So, with one nuclear blow, the Spaceport was obliterated, the mount within which its controls were hidden smashed, the plain that served its runways obliterated. ... It was a destructive feat, the written record attests, performed by Ninurta (Ishum). Now it was the tur of Nergal (Erra) to give vent to his vow of vengeance. Guiding himself from the Sinai peninsula to the Ca- naanite cities by following the King's Highway, Erra upheavaled them. The words employed by the Erra Epic are almost identical to those used in the biblical tale of Sodom and Gomorrah: Then, emulating Ishum, Erra the King's Highway followed. The cities he finished off, to desolation he overturned them. The verses that follow may well describe the creation of the new southern portion of the Dead Sea, by breaking through its southern shoreline, and the elimination of all marine life therein: He dug through the sea, its wholeness he divided. The Erra Epic thus encompasses all the three aspects of the nu- clear event: the obliteration of the Spaceport in the Sinai; the "overturning" ("upheavaling" in the Bible) of the cities of the Jordan plain; and the breach in the Dead Sea resulting in its exten- sion southward. One could expect that such a unique destructive event would have been recorded and mentioned in more than a single text; and indeed we find descriptions and recollections of the nuclear upheaval in other texts as well. One such text (known as K.500] and published in the Oxford The Nuclear Holocaust in its forests not a tree-stem was left standing. In the mountains he caused starvation, their animals he made perish. That which lives in it, even the crocodiles he made wither. As with fire he scorched the animals, banned its grains to become as dust.