Free Ancient Iraq by Georges Roux Page B

when hymns and prayers disclose the most delicate feelings and burst with genuine emotion. 20 The Mesopotamians put their confidence in their gods; they relied upon them as children rely upon their parents, they talked to them as to their ‘real fathers and mothers’, who could be offended and punish, but who could also be placated and forgive.
    Offerings, sacrifices and the observance of religious prescriptions were not all that the Mesopotamian gods required from their worshippers. To ‘make their hearts glow with libation’, to make them ‘exultant with succulent meals’ was certainly deserving, but it was not enough. The favours of the gods went tothose who led ‘a good life’, who were good parents, good sons, good neighbours, good citizens, and who practised virtues as highly esteemed then as they are now: kindness and compassion, righteousness and sincerity, justice, respect of the law and of the established order. Every day worship your god, says a Babylonian ‘Counsel of Wisdom’, but also:
    To the feeble show kindness,
Do not insult the downtrodden,
Do charitable deeds, render service all your days…
Do not utter libel, speak what is of good report,
Do not say evil things, speak well of people… 21
     
    As a reward for piousness and good conduct the gods gave man help and protection in danger, comfort in distress and bereavement, good health, honourable social position, wealth, numerous children, long life, happiness. This was perhaps not a very noble ideal by Christian standards, but the Sumerians and Babylonians were contented with it, for they were practical, down-to-earth people who loved and enjoyed life above everything. To live for ever was the dearest of their dreams, and a number of their myths – in particular Adapa and the Gilgamesh cycle (see next chapter) – aimed at explaining why man had been denied the privilege of immortality.
    But only the gods were immortal. For men death was ineluctable and had to be accepted:
    Only the gods live for ever under the sun,
As for mankind, numbered are their days,
    Whatever they achieve is but wind. 22
     
    What happened after death? Thousands of graves with their funerary equipment testify to a general belief in an after-life where the dead carried with them their most precious belongings and received food and drink from the living. But such details of the Mesopotamian eschatology as we can extract from the myth ‘Inanna's descent to the Netherworld’ or the Sumerian cycle of Gilgamesh are scanty and often contradictory. The ‘land of noreturn’ was a vast space somewhere underground, with a huge palace where reigned Ereshkigal and her husband Nergal, the god of war and pestilence, surrounded by a number of deities and guards. To reach this palace the spirits of the dead had to cross a river by ferry, as in the Greek Hades, and take off their clothes. Thereafter, they lived a wretched and dreary life in a place:
    Where dust is their food, clay their sustenance;
Where they see no light and dwell in darkness,
Where they are clad like birds with garments of wings,
Where over door and bolt dust has spread. 23
     
    Yet we learn from other sources that the sun lit the Netherworld on its way round the earth, and that the sun-god Utu pronounced judgement on the dead, so that they were probably not all treated with the same severity. It would seem that the Sumerian idea of hell was as vague as ours, and that a great deal of this literature is just poetical embroidery on a loose theme.
    Death, however, was not the Mesopotamians' sole preoccupation. They had, like us, their share of disease, poverty, frustration and sorrow, and like us they wondered: how could all this happen when the gods ruled the world? How could Evil prevail over Good? To be sure, it was often possible to put the blame on man himself. So tight was the network of rules and prohibitions that surrounded him that to sin and offend the gods was the easiest thing to do. Yet there were occasions