–– Helga Vogel ––documenting the consumption of rations, sacrifices or other items that were used in
the context of mortuary practices for members of the elites. The texts provide evidence
for administrative transactions of “large households,” that is, of palaces, temples, and,
during the Ur III period, from certain administrative centers. The archives of the wives
of the rulers of Lagash (Deimel 1920 ; Bauer 1969 ; Jagersma 2007 : 303 – 305 ; on the
archive see Beld 2002 : 5 – 44 ) present the largest sample of textual evidence from this
period. This is surely due to happenstance. Thus, it is questionable whether we can
generalize the evidence from these archives. The information includes the number of
personnel deployed during a funeral, the kinds and amounts of sacrifices made, the
order of events, and the places at which the cult of the dead took place. Because these
records are of an administrative nature and only record commodities relating to eco-
nomic procedures, they do not offer any information on mourning, mortuary rituals,
or ideas of the afterlife that may have governed these practices.
In order to fill this gap, scholars often turn to ancient Near Eastern literary texts that
describe the journey to the afterlife and the netherworld. However, this approach is
problematic because these literary texts date to periods much later than the Early
Dynastic period. Sumerian compositions relating to death and the netherworld, such
as The Descent of Inanna to the Netherworld, Bilgamesˇ, Enkidu and the Netherworld, and
The Death of Bilgamesˇ, are only attested as copies written by students in the Old
Babylonian scribal schools, thus placing them in a time about 800 – 900 years after the
Royal Cemetery of Ur (Katz 2005 : 87 ; for an analysis of the texts, see Katz 2003 ).
Akkadian poetic texts relating to death and the netherworld – for example, The Descent
of Isˇtar to the Netherworld, Nergal and Ersˇkigal, and parts of the Gilgamesˇ Epic(tablet
VII) – even date to the first millennium BC, almost 2 , 000 years after the Royal
Cemetery. It has been suggested that these texts are based on an oral tradition reaching
far back into the third millennium BC. At the same time, studies combining various
approaches have demonstrated that the complex notions concerning death in Ancient
Mesopotamia were not static, but underwent changes and developments over the
course of the millennia (Katz 2005 : 87 – 89 ; Jonker 1995 : 79 – 81 , 187 – 211 ; Groneberg
1990 ). In addition, it remains open whether literary works were really intended to
depict daily practices, which included funerals as well (Hausleiter 2003 : 20 ). As a result,
it remains difficult to apply the information provided by the ancient Near Eastern
literary tradition, itself often inconsistent, directly and uncritically to the archaeological
record of the third millennium BC. In the following, I will only discuss the poem
Urnamma A = Urnamma’s Death(Flückiger-Hawker 1999 : 93 – 182 ), which contains the
earliest known description of the netherworld to date (cf. Katz 2005 : 80 ), but is also
only attested in manuscripts from the Old Babylonian period.
PREPARATION OF THE CORPSE
Archaeological evidence, more specifically the objects that were excavated together
with skeletal remains, suggests that there were certain procedures to prepare the corpse
for the funeral. Conventional interpretations of such funerary offerings hold that
objects found together with human remains allow us to draw conclusions regarding
status, gender, occupation, and even age of a person at the time of his or her death.
Based on evidence from Early Dynastic burials, both in cemeteries and in houses, it
appears that offerings for the dead were an important part of the mortuary practices