Objects As History (Week 4)

Burial system during Mesopotamia
It is quite shocking for me that they believed that people go to a dark world for their life after death. People who were not royal were buried below the family home or next to it so that the grave could be regularly maintained. Another shocking fact is that they believed that if the person was not buried properly, they could return as a ghost to haunt the living. This thing makes me more curious, what could be the circumstances that made them believe in this. They believed that the proper place for the souls of the dead was in the netherworld of the goddess of Ereshkigal. What could be the reason for this, did they worship evil more than god? There could be a possibility that they were haunted by the evil that’s why they believed so. According to the historian Will Durant, “the Sumerians believed in an after-life but like the Greeks; they pictured the other world as a dark adobe of miserable shadows, to which all the dead descended indiscriminately.”