Death in ancient Mesopotamia was something to be dreaded. Nowhere is there mentioned an afterlife condition comparable to our ideas of heaven. Their netherworld, endured by all, must have been the prototype of our idea of hell. Its a place wherein souls are bereft of light, clay their food and dirt is their drink. They are ruled over by the harrowing figure of Ereshkigal, forever rending her clothes and clawing her flesh in mourning over her endless miscarriages. These unpleasant descriptions are a natural reaction to the experience of burial, being trapped within the earth where no light can reach and nothing can grow. In Gilgamesh, Enkidu bewails his fate to sit with the ghosts of the dead. This envokes claustrophobic imagery of having to crouch for eternity, but it might also be related to the fetal position that bodies take on at the onset of rigor mortis, sometimes causing bodies to sit up. Another consistency among the dead is decomposition. Eventually all bodies are stripped of their distinguishing features. Every man, regardless of his position in society while alive, is eaten away until all that remains are his bones, and then these are ground to dust. This observation can be found in Gilgamesh when Enkidu has his dream of the dead. On entering the House of Dust, everywhere I looked there were royal crowns gathered in heaps, everywhere I listened, it was the bearer of crowns who in the past had ruled the land, but who now served Anu and Enlil cooked meats, served confections, and poured cooled water from waterskins. The kings of old are forced, in the netherworld, to serve their masters food and water that they cannot partake of, being dead. The strangest, and perhaps most poetic, description of the inhabitants of the netherworld is that They are clothed like birds in wings for garments. In Gilgamesh, when Enkidu has his dream of the dead, he says of Anzu, He...turned me into a dove, so that my arms were feathered like ...
