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335 the biblical Book of Lamentations, lamenting the destruction of Je- rusalem by the hands of the Babylonians, the Sumerian lamenta- tions suggested to the scholars who had first translated them that the Mesopotamian catastrophe was also the result of an invasion— this one by clashing Elamite and Amorite troops. When the first lamentation tablets were found, the scholars be- lieved that Ur alone suffered destruction, and they titled the trans- lations accordingly. But as more texts were discovered, it was realized that Ur was neither the only city affected, nor the focal point of the catastrophe. Not only were similar lamentations found bewailing the fate of Nippur, Uruk, Eridu, but some of the texts also provided lists of the affected cities: they appeared to begin in the southwest and extend to the northeast, encompassing the whole of southern Mesopotamia. It became apparent that a general, sud- den, and concurrent catastrophe had befallen all the cities—not in slow succession, as would happen in the case of a progressive inva- sion, but all at once. Such scholars as Th. Jacobsen (The Reign of Ibbi-Sin) then concluded that the "barbarian invaders" had nothing to do with the "dire catastrophe," a calamity he called "really quite puzzling.” "Whether we shall ever see with full clarity what happened in those years," Jacobsen wrote, “only time will tell; the full story, we are convinced, is still far beyond our grasp." But the puzzle can be solved, and the full story grasped, if we relate the catastrophe in Mesopotamia to the nuclear explosion in the Sinai. The texts, remarkable for their length and in many instances also in excellent state of preservation, usually begin by bewailing the abrupt abandonment of all of Sumer's sacred precincts by their var- ious gods, their temples "abandoned to the wind." The desolation caused by the catastrophe is then described vividly, by such verses as these: Causing cities to be desolated, [causing] houses to become desolate; Causing stalls to be desolate, the sheepfolds to be emptied; That Sumer's oxen no longer stand in their stalls, that its sheep no longer roam in its sheepfolds; That its rivers flow with water that is bitter, that its cultivated fields grow weeds, that its steppes grow withering plants. The Nuclear Holocaust