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336 dren, the father says not 'O my wife’ ... the young child grows not sturdy on their knee, the nursemaid chants not a lullaby .. . kingship has been taken away from the land." Before World War II had ended, before Hiroshima and Nagasaki were upheavaled with atomic weapons rained on them from the skies, one could still read the biblical tale of Sodom and Gomorrah and leave be the traditional "sulphur and brimstone" for lack of a better explanation. To scholars who had not yet come face-to-face with the awesomeness of nuclear weapons, the Sumerian lamenta- tion texts bespoke (as the scholars titled them) the "Destruction of Ur" or the "Destruction of Sumer." But that is not what these texts describe: they describe desolation, not destruction. The cities were there but without people; the stalls were there but without cat- tle; the shcepfolds remained but were empty; the rivers flowed but their waters became bitter; the fields still stretched but they grew only weeds; and on the steppe the plants sprouted, only to wither away. Invasion, war, killing—all those evils were well known to man- kind by then; but. as the lamentation texts clearly state, this one was unique and never experienced before: On the Land [Sumer] fell a calamity, one unknown to man: The death was not by the hand of an enemy; it was an unseen death, "which roams the street, is let loose in the road; it stands beside a man—yet none can see it; when it enters a house, its ap- pearance is unknown." There was no defense against this "evil which has assailed the land like a ghost: . , . The highest wall, the thickest walls, it passes as a flood; no door can shut it out. no bolt can turn it back: through the door like a snake it glides, through the hinge like a wind it blows in." Those who hid behind doors were felled inside; those who ran to the rooftops died on the rooftops: those who fled to the streets were stricken in the streets: "Cough and phlegm weakened the chest, the mouth was filled with spittle and foam ... dumbness and daze have come upon them, an un- wholesome numbness ... an evil curse, a headache . . . their spirit abandoned their bodies." As they died, it was a most grue- some death: THE WARS OF GODS AND MEN in the cities and the hamlets. ' 'the mother cares not for her chil- One that had never been seen before, one which could not be withstood.