262 The Religions of Ancient Egypt and Babyloniakings from their tombs at Susa. Sennacherib similarly desecrated [285]
the burial-places of the ancestors of Merodach-baladan; and one
of the oldest of Babylonian monuments, the so-called Stela of the
Vultures, depicts the bodies of the slaughtered enemy exposed
to the vultures that feed upon them, while the slain Babylonians
themselves are buried by their companions under a tumulus of
earth.
Theekimmuwas thus, properly speaking, the ghost of the
unburied corpse; whereas theutukkuwas the ghost of a corpse
which had obtained burial, but through some accident or other
had escaped from the realms of the dead. While, therefore,
theekimmunecessarily had a human origin, theutukkuwas
only accidentally a human ghost. The rites with which its body
had been laid in the grave, ought to have confined it to the
underground regions of the dead; and the“pure water”and food
with which it had been provided were sufficient to sustain it in
its existence below. If it returned to the upper world it could only
have been through the arts of the necromancer, and the sufferings
it may have inflicted upon men were but the revenge it took for
being disturbed. Theutukku, like thelil, belonged to a class of
supernatural beings who manifested their presence in a particular
way, and it was only as it were accidentally that the ghost of a
dead man came to be included among them.
But it must be noticed that no distinction was drawn in the
mind of the Babylonian between these supernatural beings and
the ghosts of the dead, at all events so far as their nature and to
a certain extent their powers were concerned. The ghost might
become anekimmujust as it might become alil; all were alike
denizens of the underground world, and in primeval times obeyed
[286] the rule of the En-lil,“the lord of ghosts.”
The same belief must once have prevailed in Palestine. When
the spirit of Samuel was called up from the dead, the witch(^227) WAI.v. 61, vi. 54, 55, where we must readkibira.