appears already in the Old Babylonian Gilgamesh, and in the prophet
Jeremiah.^35
But in imagining death people are not content with the idea of an end-
less sleep. The dead are generally represented as going somewhere. The
‘somewhere’ is commonly located below the earth. This is the logical
corollary of the fact that in the fourth millennium, which is when the
latest phase of undivided Indo-European has to be dated, and in all the
lands that come into serious question as the original habitat, disposal of
the dead was usually by inhumation. The deceased terrestrial returned to
his Mother Earth. His tomb was a kind of house –– the house of clay, as it is
termed in a Vedic hymn (mr
̇
nmáya- gr
̇há-, 7. 89. 1). Indeed it was often
constructed in the form of a house or chamber that was then covered over by
a tumulus.
In mythological thinking the countless individual tombs merged into one
place that all the dead go to, under a mountain or under the earth. Vedic,
Greek, and Latin poets speak of the Lower Darkness. ‘Whoever threatens us,’
Indra is besought, ádharam
̇
gamaya ̄ támah
̇, ‘make him go to the lower darkness’
(RV 10. 152. 4); ádharam is etymologically identical with Latin inferum.
Another Vedic word for ‘darkness’ used in this connection, rájas-, corre-
sponds exactly to the Greek #ρεβο, the destination of Homeric departing
spirits (Il. 16. 327, Od. 20. 356, etc.). The tragedians speak of the σκο ́ το
below the earth, the Latin poets of the infernae tenebrae (Virg. Aen. 7. 325,
Hor. C. 4. 7. 25). The Germanic name for the place is Hel. Norse and Old
English poets use the expressions ‘he went to Hel’, ‘you sent my sister to Hel’,
‘Hel took him’. The word is related to a verb meaning ‘conceal’ and to Old
Irish cuile‘cellar’, ‘underground chamber’.^36
In some traditions the destination of the dead is known as the house of
a certain figure. In Greek it is the house of Hades; I shall come back to the
question of what the name Hades means. In Irish it is tech nDuinn, the house
of Donn, who was perhaps the Dusky One, from *dhus-no-, related to Latin
fuscus. In India it is the house or domain or seat of Yama, that man who first
accepted death. In the Maha ̄bha ̄rata warriors are often described as being sent
to his abode (6. 50. 69, 73, 60. 28, 31, 71. 30, 75. 11, etc.).
The journey there is spoken of as going the way of no return. This expres-
sion in the Indian epics is paralleled in Greek and Latin poetry, and also in an
Ossetic narrative. Similarly in a Hittite ritual text, in which the anger of the
(^35) Gilgamesh OBV Meissner i 12′–15′ p. 276 George; Jer. 51. 39 = 57; cf. West (1997), 573.
(^36) Atlamál 97. 7 gekk til heliar; ibid. 56. 9 sendoð systr Helio; Beowulf 1698 þær hine
Hel onfe ̄ng. Cf. Grimm (1883–8), 313, 800–7, 1375, 1537–40; de Vries (1956), i. 91; Lorenz
(1984), 100.
388 10. Mortality and Fame