and burial. Feasting and sacrifices continue for several days. Then
on Day 6, the bones are taken to what is called thehekur-house,
theirfinal resting place, and laid out on a couch. There are further
offerings, and the feasting continues as the air isfilled with the
dirges of the musicians and the lamentations of wailing women,
and is heavy with the aroma of fresh bread and roasting meats
intermingled with the terror-soaked stench of sweat, blood and
excrement of the sacrificed animals. These animals– cattle and
sheep, horses and asses–will provide the king with livestock in his
new world. A piece of turf, cut from the ground and taken to the
burial place, symbolises the dead man’s pasturelands, part of the
king’s estate in the next world where His Deceased Majesty will
spend eternity in peace and comfort.
But this idyllic life-after-death was not entirely self-supporting,
for the dead man’s cult required a fair amount of upkeep from the
king’s survivors. Apart from the king’shekur-house, a tomb of
stone –of which, alas, we have nofirmly identifiable surviving
examples–areas of land were set aside for the maintenance of the
deceased, with livestock and personnel to go with them. The latter,
lifetime employees, included gatekeepers, herdsmen, domestic
servants and farm-hands. Entry to the king’s tomb, however, was
strictly limited to the dead man’s immediate family. It was their
responsibility, and above all the responsibility of the king’s heir, to
ensure the maintenance of a cult in his honour, involving regular
offerings of sacrificed animals to his spirit.
So too at lower levels of Hittite society, ancestor cults were
maintained in honour of the deceased, and sacrifices made to them,
to keep alive their memory and help them maintain contact with
the living members of their family. But like many of their fellow-
Near Easterners, the Hittites seem to have had a pessimistic view of
life after death–at least for the lesser members of society. The few
Hittite texts we have which refer to the afterlife generally treat it as
a gloomy, sunless netherworld region accessed by pits, holes, and
shafts dug into the ground. And one of these texts tells us that when
you get there, you have only foul water to drink and bits of mud to
eat, and you don’t recognise any of your relatives, including your
mother or your sisters and brothers, nor they you.
100 WARRIORS OF ANATOLIA