The book, Doctrines of After Death in the Civilization of Mesopotamia, This thought, fair public opinion. This book deals with the study of those beliefs in ancient civilizations.Death has had, since the earliest times in human history, a special importance in human thought, stemming from two things. The first is that death is an absolute reality that no one can escape from encountering, and the second is represented in the ambiguity that surrounds it as a transition to the unknown about which nothing is known. With the first conscious practices directed by the mind, human thought began to cling repeatedly to trying to get out of the cycle of helplessness and confusion towards death, changing its means at every stage of its development, starting with magic, passing through myth and religion, and ending with science, but it was standing in all those stages helpless in the face of the harsh and painful reality of death. . These attempts continued uninterruptedly, prompted by the nature of man and his reactions to everything he encounters and which surrounds his life of mysterious cases and phenomena in which death comes at the beginning, and in addition to this what death represents as a factor that provokes apprehensions and anxiety in the human being who, although he can forget the fear of death. And the frightening fate that awaits him through his preoccupation with life, but he soon finds it before him with all its cruel effects through the death of others.
Because death is related to the existence and destiny of man; It was obvious that it was not seen as an absolute end to life, and hence the ideas about the immortality of the soul, the afterlife and resurrection, in addition to everything related to reckoning, reward, punishment and other ideas related to the afterlife. The idea of another life has found a wide field in human thought in general, as most societies have believed in it to the extent that we can say that the idea of life The other is earlier in its appearance and more general in its spread even than the belief in the existence of a god or gods, and therefore it has become natural for the beliefs of death and the afterlife to occupy a prominent place in the urban beliefs of the Umm Tan society. Society in the great impact that it leaves on that society’s view of life itself, its concept of life and the behavior of its members in it. In other words, any research into the beliefs of death and death is no longer for any society must be, in one way or another, a necessary beginning to identify the concept by which that society perceives life and its values. It is the concept that determines the attitude of individuals towards life, both through their behavior and their behavior in their daily work, their ambitions, their hopes and their pains throughout their living with them, in addition to what they express in literature, arts, social systems, and folk traditions written or circulated orally, to the last of the aspects of social life and its organization.
Before I discuss the subject of death and the afterlife in the ancient Mesopotamian beliefs, which is the subject of this book, I must mention a brief overview of the importance of the ancient Mesopotamian religion. That religion within which the population’s beliefs about death and its aftermath crystallized. The truth is that the great importance of that religion is not limited to the fact that it persisted for many centuries in ancient Iraq and was embraced by many peoples, from the Sumerians to the Akkadians, the Babylonians and the Assyrians, and each of these adds to it from his own ideas and practices what It guarantees its continuity and development, but to that it is of special importance in human thought also because of its influence on other peoples in the ancient Near East, especially those that had direct or indirect contact with the ancient inhabitants of Mesopotamia.