Kur, the Mesopotamian Underworld

For the peoples of ancient Mesopotamia, the Sumerians and later the Babylonians and Assyrians, the cosmos was divided between the gods of heaven and the gods of the earth below. Heaven belonged to An, the sky god, and to the great gods. Humans lived on the surface of the earth, created, as the myths say, to relieve the gods of labour and to feed them through offerings. Beneath the earth lay the Abzu, the fresh water that fed springs and rivers, domain of the clever god Enki, called Ea in Akkadian. And below the Abzu, or at the far edge of the world, lay the realm of the dead.

The Sumerians called it kur, a word that also meant mountain and foreign land, the hostile highlands beyond the plain. Other names were arali and, in Akkadian, Irkalla. Poets called it the Land of No Return. Its entrance lay in the west, where the sun set, and the sun god Utu, or Shamash, passed through it every night, bringing light and justice to the dead before rising again in the east.

Late Babylonian scholars systematised this picture. One text of the first millennium BCE describes three heavens, each made of a different precious stone, and three earths: humans on the upper earth, the Abzu in the middle and the Anunnaki, the gods of the underworld, in the lowest. Earlier sources are less tidy, and the diagram on this page combines these scholarly layers with the gates and city described in the poems.

The poems describe the underworld as a great city with a palace at its heart, surrounded by walls and entered through seven gates, each guarded and each requiring the visitor to give something up. Neti was the chief gatekeeper. Ereshkigal, “lady of the great earth”, sat on her throne there, with the Anunnaki as judges and her minister Namtar, whose name means fate, as her messenger. In the Gilgamesh epic a scribe of the underworld kneels before her, holding the tablet on which the arrivals are recorded.

The place was dark and dusty. In a dream Enkidu, Gilgamesh’s companion, sees it as the “house of dust”, where the dead sit in darkness, dust is their food and clay their bread, and they are clothed like birds with garments of feathers. Kings and priests are there as well as commoners. Everyone, good or bad, went down to the same realm.

Yet the dead were not all equal. In the Sumerian poem Bilgames and the Netherworld, Enkidu’s ghost tells Gilgamesh how different people fare. A man with one son weeps bitterly; a man with seven sons sits among the junior gods. Those who have no one to remember them eat scraps thrown into the street. The comfort of the dead thus depended on their families. Households buried their dead under the floors of their houses and kept up the kispum, a regular meal of food and water offered to the ancestors. A ghost without burial or offerings could become restless and return to haunt the living, and exorcists recited spells to send such ghosts back down.

The most famous journey to the underworld is that of Inanna, the Sumerian goddess of love and war, known as Ishtar in Akkadian. Dressed in her finery and carrying the symbols of her power, she sets out for the underworld, leaving her faithful minister Ninshubur with instructions to seek help if she does not return. At each of the seven gates she must surrender a garment or an ornament, until she comes before her sister Ereshkigal stripped of everything. The Anunnaki fix on her the eye of death, and her lifeless body is hung on a hook.

After three days and three nights Ninshubur goes to the great gods. Only Enki helps. From the dirt beneath his fingernails he creates two small beings who slip into the underworld, comfort Ereshkigal in her sorrow and, as a reward, ask for the body. They sprinkle it with the food and water of life, and Inanna rises. But no one leaves the Land of No Return without a substitute. Demons follow her back to earth, and when she finds her husband, the shepherd Dumuzi, enjoying himself instead of mourning her, she gives him up to them. In the end Dumuzi and his devoted sister Geshtinanna share the burden, each spending half the year below.

Another myth, Nergal and Ereshkigal, explains how the underworld gained a king. Ereshkigal, who cannot leave her realm to join the banquets of the gods, takes offence at the god Nergal, who is sent down to her. In the longer version the two become lovers, and the story ends with Nergal ruling the underworld at her side. The myth gives Ereshkigal a moving voice: she complains that since girlhood she has never known the play of maidens or the pleasures of the young, and threatens to raise the dead so that they outnumber the living unless Nergal is sent back to her.

Mesopotamian ideas about the dead changed slowly over three millennia, and our sources are uneven: literary poems, ritual texts, letters and the evidence of graves. The great burials of the Royal Cemetery of Ur, around 2600–2450 BCE, show early rulers taking rich goods with them, presumably to present to the gods of the underworld. Later sources focus more on families and their ancestors.

The Mesopotamian picture of the dead resembles that of its neighbours, and scholars often compare it with the Sheol of the Hebrew Bible and the Hades of Homer: a shadowy realm common to all, without moral reward or punishment. Whether these resemblances come from direct influence or from shared ancient ideas is debated. The old religion faded in the first centuries CE, as the last cuneiform tablets were written.

The underworld returned to view when nineteenth- and twentieth-century scholars deciphered cuneiform and pieced the poems together from broken tablets. Inanna’s descent, with its stripping at the seven gates, has since inspired poets, composers and feminist writers, who read it as a story of loss, courage and return.