Sumeria, Death and the Afterlife

Sumeria, Views on Death

The Mesopotamian (Sumerian, Babylonian, and Assyrian) attitudes to death differed widely from those of the Egyptians. They were grim and stark: sickness and death were the wages of sin. This view was to percolate, with pitiless logic and simplicity, through Judaism into Christianity. Although the dead were buried in Mesopotamia, no attempts were made to preserve their bodies.

According to Mesopotamian mythology, the gods had made humans of clay, but to the clay had been added the flesh and blood of a god specially slaughtered for the occasion. God was, therefore, present in all people. The sole purpose of humanity’s creation was to serve the gods, to carry the yoke and labour for them. Offended gods withdrew their support, thereby opening the door to demons, whose activities the malevolent could invoke.

The main strands of Sumero-Akkadian thought held no prospect of an afterlife, at any rate of a kind that anyone might look forward to. In the Gilgamesh epic, the aging folk hero, haunted by the prospect of his own death, sets off to visit Utnapishtim, who, with his wife, was the only mortal to have achieved immortality. He meets Siduri, the wine maiden, who exhorts him to make the most of the present for “the life which thou seekest thou wilt not find.” There was no judgment after death, a common fate awaiting the good and the bad alike. Death was conceived of in terms of appalling grimness, unrelieved by any hope of salvation through human effort or divine compassion. The dead were, in fact, among the most dreaded beings in early Mesopotamian demonology. In a myth called “The Descent of Ishtar to the Underworld,” the fertility goddess decides to visit kur-nu-gi-a (“the land of no return”), where the dead “live in darkness, eat clay, and are clothed like birds with wings.” She threatens the doorkeeper: “If thou openest not that I may enter I will smash the doorpost and unhinge the gate. I will lead up the dead, that they may eat the living.” Given this background, it is not surprising that offerings to the dead were made in a spirit of fear; if not propitiated they would return and cause all kinds of damage.

The Babylonians did not dissect bodies, and their approach to disease and death was spiritual rather than anatomical or physiological. They did not speculate about the functions of organs but considered them the seat of emotions and mental faculties in general. The heart was believed to be the seat of the intellect, the liver of affectivity, the stomach of cunning, the uterus of compassion, and the ears and the eyes of attention. Breathing and life were thought of in the same terms. The Akkadian word napistu was used indifferently to mean “the throat,” “to breathe,” and “life” itself.