The first accounts that people have from the realm of the dead are available to us from Mesopotamia. Fortunately for many people, many of the ancient Sumerian myths, over 4,000 years old, have been completely preserved on clay tablets. Two of which unfortunately, which we will talk about today, have great descriptions with the underworld. The first that people will control could be the epic of Gilgamesh. In tablet 7 and tablet twelve we have great imagery of the items the Mesopotamians believed the afterlife being.
In tablet seven one of many protagonists, Enkidu, gets a fateful dream that speaks of his impending death. And in the dream he sees the vision of the otherworld. Here we see the Underworld called the House of Darkness. It’s a setting of no recourse wherein the dwellers are bereft of sunshine. It will be viewed as a miserable place where people eat dirt for food, where king, priest, ecstatic, and everybody else all are in an egalitarian state of shared misery.
Tablet twelve is much more striking in relation to it descriptions of the underworld. Here, when he traverses into the underworld, he is cautioned against bringing certain items. This is not what we see in some biblical quotes. They all seem to generally be stuff that indicate enjoyment of life. Not surprisingly, he ignores the recommendation and really riles the departed. The sweet smells, thoroughly clean and clean raiment, footwear, weapons, and signs of authority are too much for the dead to ignore.
On account he clumsily taking each one of these things to the hell, and because he met with his lost relatives, the spirits were stirred plus they kept him from escaping. Once trapped, he died with his fantastic body became riddled with vermin. In his last encounter using the land of the living, he recounts the fact that fate of some of the departed surpasses others – and it depends on what they leave behind. For instance, the person with no children is depressed and sad while the guy with 7 children is supremely happy. So it appears that, in accordance towards Near Easterners, our fate, although bleak, is augmented through the choices and opportunities of our life.
