of rituals or ceremonies. Such a strict separation of the world of the dead from the
world of the living is quite characteristic for Mesopotamian religious beliefs.
In the case of the Royal Tombs, Woolley proposed that the personal belongings of
the deceased where brought into the burial chamber after the corpse had been pre-
pared. It was probably at this point that the people who were to be buried together with
the deceased would have entered the burial chamber where they were either killed or
they killed themselves. The entry to the chamber was then blocked. Then the people
who were to die inside the shaft or in the entry area to the shaft took their places.
Woolley assumed that these people were poisoned (Woolley 1934 : 34 – 42 ). It is likely
that their bodies were arranged after their death (cf. Pollock 2007 b) and that the shafts
were then cleaned up to a certain degree, as can be seen in the death pit 1237. The
corpses were covered with mats and the deep shafts were filled with soil (Woolley 1934 :
34 – 42 ). The ways in which the shafts were filled showed the same degree of variation
as the construction of the Royal Tombs, and it would go beyond the framework of this
chapter to discuss this in greater detail. Yet the great degree of variability makes it
impossible to assume the existence of common or compulsory ritual practices. It is still
uncertain whether a mausoleum for libations was located above the Royal Tombs
(Pollock 1999 : 211 ), while the possibility of above-ground markers for the “private
graves” has not been considered yet.
Textual documentation from the Early Dynastic period is insufficient to allow us
to draw conclusions concerning conceptions of the afterlife or of the journey of the
dead into the netherworld. The earliest description of a journey to the netherworld can
be found in a poem about death of king Urnamma ( 2112 – 2095 BC), the founder of the
Third Dynasty of Ur (Flückiger-Hawker 1999 : 93 – 182 ). It should be noted that all the
manuscripts for this text date to the following Old Babylonian period (c. 1800 BC), thus
far there is no manuscript from the Ur III period itself. The powerful narrative of this
poem offers only one detail about the funeral of Urnamma: we learn from this text that
he was buried together with his “donkeys,” here interpreted to mean a donkey together
with a cart (lines 70 – 71 ). Traveling by cart, Urnamma embarks on his long and difficult
journey to the netherworld (lines 72 – 75 ). Upon arrival he gives presents to the seven
gatekeepers of the netherworld. When the king reaches the center of the netherworld,
the dead welcome him enthusiastically. Urnamma then slaughters numerous oxen and
sheep and holds a banquet for the “famous kings,” including isˇiband lumah
̆priests and
NIN-dingirpriestesses (lines 76 – 82 ). The composition describes this event with the
following words: “(For) the food of the netherworld is bitter and drink of the nether-
world is salty” (Flückiger-Hawker 1999 : 116 , line 83 ). Afterwards, Urnamma offers
substantial animal sacrifices to the netherworld and makes offerings to the gods of the
netherworld in their “palaces.”
These passages have sometimes been used to interpret objects found in the Royal
Tombs as sacrifices to the netherworld (for example, Tinney 1998 : 28 ; Meyer 2000 ),
although no one has suggested that this also be applied to interpret “private graves.”
Thus, even those scholars who have used the composition “The Death of Urnamma” to
interpret the finds from the Royal Tombs have not suggested that there was a single
notion of how the dead behaved in the netherworld. However, the text is still impor-
tant, because it provides us with information regarding the organization of the
netherworld as envisioned during the Ur III period, if we assume that the text was
indeed composed then and not later. The text offers us a glimpse at least into certain
–– Helga Vogel ––