ers were rare; memorial monuments inside temples have been
found but had no physical connection to the burial. Crema-
tion was uncommon, not because of a perceived need to pre-
serve the body intact but because of the forbidding costs of
building large fi res in a virtually woodless environment. Th e
Achaemenid kings of Persia were laid to rest in free-standing
tombs and rock tombs cut into the imposing cliff s near the
royal palaces of Persepolis. In contrast to the hidden Meso-
potamian graves, these burials were highly visible and hint at
a rather diff erent role of death and funerary care in Persian
society.
Spectacular recent fi nds of the royal tombs from the Mid-
dle Bronze Age (ca. 2000–1600 b.c.e.) palace at Qatna in Syria
and the tombs of several Assyrian queens of the ninth and
eighth centuries b.c.e. beneath the royal palace of Nimrud
in northern Iraq have caused sensations in the archaeologi-
cal world, but the most famous ancient Near Eastern burial
ground remains the cemetery of Ur in southern Babylonia,
excavated in the 1920s. Th is site, adjoining the central temple,
was used for more than half a millennium, from about 2600
to 2000 b.c.e., for thousands of burials. Th e vast majority of
the bodies were interred in simple pits—although oft en with
very rich grave goods—but 16 burials from the mid-third
millennium b.c.e. occupy multichambered stone tombs at
the bottom of shaft graves. Th is group of graves is known as
the Royal Cemetery of Ur. Its best-known resident is Queen
Puabi, whose identity was revealed by an inscribed cylinder
seal found with her body. Puabi and the other main occu-
pants of the shaft graves were not buried alone but with many
other bodies, male and female, evidently as part of opulent
sacrifi ces that also included vehicles with their draft animals,
luxury objects such as musical instruments and furniture,
and food and drink. One such mass burial contained the
bodies of 74 men and women.
Today most scholars agree that in life these people were
the attendants of the main occupiers of the graves. Th ey died
during ceremonies conducted at the funerals of members of
the ruling elite. As drinking bowls were found close to their
bodies, it is thought that they took poison. While no writings
that could shed light on this practice survive from that time,
literary texts from the beginning of the second millennium
b.c.e. describe the burials of Mesopotamian rulers. Most im-
portant, a Sumerian composition today known as “Th e Death
of Gilgamesh” mentions how the favorite wife, junior wife,
singer, cup bearer, barber, and attendants of this mythical
hero-king of Uruk lay down with him in death. Th e grave
goods are described as meeting gift s and presents for the gods
of the netherworld, and this idea is also prominent in other
textual sources.
Ancient Mesopotamian texts allow considerable insight
into the mythology of death. Death was seen as the inevitable
fate of all humans. Th e Epic of Gilgamesh, the best known of
these texts, exemplifi es the impossibility of escaping physical
death even for a man like Gilgamesh, who is two parts divine
and only one part human. Th e funeral ceremony enabled the
dead person’s spirit to voyage properly into the netherworld.
Without it a spirit would wander the world of the living, lost
and increasingly dangerous. Consequently, the loss of a dead
body—for example, to the enemy on a battlefi eld as in the case
of Sargon II, king of Assyria (r. 721–705 b.c.e.)—was a catas-
trophe that demanded rituals to calm the restless and mali-
cious spirit. Th e responsibility for the funeral rested with the
family of the deceased, as did the ensuing care for the dead,
consisting off erings of food and drink to the ancestors and
the evocation of their names. Although cemeteries existed,
the most common form of burial was in tombs underneath
the family home and accessible to it.
Contacts between the living and their dead were not
limited to funerary duties but could also provide insight into
the future. Th e netherworld was where the sun god, on his
daily cycle through the universe, spent the night. Hence it
was the source of the new day and, implicitly, of all forth-
coming events. Th e inhabitants of the netherworld were
therefore privy to future knowledge, and contacting them by
necromancy (conjuring of the spirits of the dead in order to
communicate with them) could off er that knowledge to the
living.
Th e netherworld mirrored the world of the living and
was imagined as a city surrounded by fortifi ed and gated
walls. Th is “Land without Return,” as it was called, was ruled
by a queen, Ereshkigal, and her consort, Nergal, the god of
pestilence and destruction. Th ey were assisted by the vizier
Namtar and the judges of the netherworld, among them Gil-
gamesh and his friend Enkidu as well as the historical king
Ur-Nammu, who ruled Ur at the turn of the second millen-
nium b.c.e. Th e story of how Ishtar/Inanna, the goddess of
sexuality and fertility, unsuccessfully tried to wrest control
over the netherworld from her sister Ereshkigal survives in
two diff erent versions, one with very close parallels in the
Greek myth of Persephone: Ishtar/Inanna goes to the neth-
erworld in order to rescue her dead lover Dumuzi, the god
of vegetation. Captured by Ereshkigal, she succeeds only in
striking a compromise: Dumuzi is allowed back among the
living for part of the year but must return to the netherworld
for the rest of it, thus defi ning vegetation’s c ycle of demise a nd
renewal. In the other version of the story Ishtar/Inanna has
another motivation, the ambition to rule over the innumer-
able dead, but like death itself, the queen of the dead cannot
be defeated.
Th e concept of the dying god who returns to life fea-
tured prominently in the Near Eastern mythology of death.
Th is ultimate sacrifi ce of a deity was presented as an integral
part in the creation of humankind, as the dead god’s essence
was added to the clay from which humans were formed to be
servants to the gods. Originally, therefore, humans were im-
mortal, and mortality came about only through a later deci-
sion of the gods: As humankind became numerous and their
constant hubbub a nuisance, the divine creators sent a fl ood
to destroy them. Appreciating the value of the few survivors,
the gods then conceived mortality as a countermeasure todeath and burial practices: The Middle East 315