Irkalla

Mesopotamian religion offered its dead no meaningfully differentiated afterlife. Whether a person had lived virtuously or wickedly, ruled a city or swept its streets, Irkalla awaited everyone alike: a dim, dust filled realm beneath the earth, entered through the western horizon and never left. Surviving descriptions, above all in the poem Inanna's Descent to the Underworld and in the flood hero Gilgamesh's vision of the afterlife near the end of his own epic, dwell on the bleakness of the place rather than on any system of reward or punishment. The dead are described as wearing feathers like birds, eating dust and clay in place of bread, and living in darkness under the rule of the goddess Ereshkigal, Inanna's older sister, who governs the realm from a palace of lapis lazuli guarded by a gatekeeper, Neti, and a council of seven terrifying judges, the Anunnaki of the underworld.

This is a notably different picture from later, more developed afterlife theologies elsewhere in the ancient Near East and in Egypt, and it left Mesopotamian religious energy focused correspondingly less on securing a good afterlife than on maintaining the goodwill of the living gods and on the practical rites, offerings of food and drink poured out for the dead by their descendants, that were thought to keep a shade's existence in Irkalla from becoming even more miserable through neglect.

Irkalla's clearest narrative treatment comes from the myth of Inanna's Descent, in which the goddess of love and war travels to the underworld, by most readings to confront or challenge her sister Ereshkigal, and must pass through seven gates to reach her. At each gate the gatekeeper Neti, acting on Ereshkigal's instruction, strips Inanna of one item of her royal regalia and clothing, her crown, her lapis beads, her breastplate, her gold ring, her measuring rod and line, her royal robe, until she arrives before Ereshkigal entirely naked and powerless, "bowed low." Ereshkigal fixes the eye of death upon her and Inanna is struck dead and hung on a hook, a fate from which she is rescued only through Enki's intervention and, at Ereshkigal's insistence, a substitute sent down in her place, ultimately her husband Dumuzi.

The seven gate structure is read by Assyriologists as expressing a broader Mesopotamian principle: the underworld strips away worldly status and possession entirely, so that even a great goddess enters it as bare and powerless as the humblest of the human dead. The same descent structure recurs, with variation, in the later Akkadian version of the myth, the Descent of Ishtar, and echoes of it appear in Gilgamesh's own underworld journey, making Irkalla one of the most narratively developed single locations in the whole of Mesopotamian mythology despite the sparseness of its own physical description.