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38 "Te controlling the Nile's waters from subterranean caverns. “It was he who kept the doors that held the inundations, who drew back the bolts at the proper time." In technical language we are being informed that at the most appropriate site from an engi- neering point of view, Ptah built "twin caverns" (two con- nected reservoirs) whose locks could be opened and _ closed, "polted" and unbolted, thus regulating artificially the level and flow of the Nile's waters. Ptah and the other gods were called, in Egyptian, Ntr—"Guard- ian, Watcher." They had come to Egypt, the Egyptians wrote, from Ta-Ur, the "Far/Foreign Land," whose name Ur meant "olden" but could have also been the actual place name—a place well known from Mesopotamian and biblical records: the ancient city of Ur in southern Mesopotamia. And the straits of the Red Sea, which connected Mesopotamia and Egypt, were called Ta-Neter, the "Place of the Gods," the passage by which they had come to Egypt. That the earliest gods did come from the biblical lands of Shem is additionally borne out by the puzzling fact that the names of these olden gods were of "Semitic" (Akkadian) derivation. Thus Ptah, which had no meaning in Egyptian, meant "he who fashioned things by carving and opening up" in the Semitic tongues. In time—after 9,000 years, according to Manetho—Ra, a son of Ptah, became the ruler over Egypt. His name, too, had no meaning in Egyptian, but because Ra was associated with a bright celestial body, scholars assume that Ra meant "bright." We do know with greater certainty that one of his nicknames, Tem, had the Semitic connotation "the Complete, the Pure One." It was believed by the Egyptians that Ra, too, had come to Earth from the "Planet of Millions of Years" in a Celestial Barge, the conical upper part of which, called Ben-Ben ("Pyramidion Bird"), was later on preserved in a specially built shrine in the sacred city Anu (the biblical On, which is better known by its Greek name He- liopolis). In dynastic times Egyptians made pilgrimages to this shrine to view the Ben-Ben and other relics associated with Ra and the celestial travels of the gods. It was to Ra as Tern that the Israel- ites were forced to build the city called in the Bible Pi-Torn— "The Gateway of Tern." It was the Heliopolitan priests who first recorded the traditions of the gods of Egypt and who related that the first "company" of the gods headed by Ra consisted of nine "Guardians"—Ra and THE WARS OF GODS AND MEN