Care of the dead

Two Assyrian soldiers forcing Elamite captive to grind bones of his family, 7th - 6th c. BC. This wasn't like most people think an act of random cruelty...Making someone destroy the bones of their ancestors was a deliberate forced act of sacrilege...

Assyrian culture, like all the other Mesopotamian cultures, was built around the cult of the dead. Assyrians, often buried their dead under house floors. They also practiced "kispu", regular, ritual feeding and watering of the deceased after their burial...

Based on this, in the "Death as a Stage for Performing Identity in the Assyrian Empire" Petra M. Creamer concludes that "Socially, this indicates deep linkages to familial practices and ancestral memory".

So, it is precisely because Assyrians respected their dead ancestors so much, that I am sure that them forcing their Elamite captives to destroy the bones of their own ancestors was a lot more than just ordinary act of cruelty...

We actually know why they did this. There is a  King Ashurbanipal’s inscription in which he says that he exposed the grave of the Elamite kings and deprived them of sacrificial food and drink offerings...

Destroying the bones of the enemy ancestors was done for the same reason: To prevent the Elamites from sacrificing food and drink to their dead.

But why was sacrificing food and drink to the dead so important to the Mesopotamians and their Iranian neighbours?

And we know that it was very important, because we have written records, from the 3rd millennium BC onwards about "kispu" (the care of the dead), which involved regular "feeding and watering" of the dead though food and water sacrifices...

The other day, I came across a paper entitled "Peace for the Dead, or kispu(m) Again" by Akio Tsukimoto, in which he talks about mentions of this practice in Sumerian, Old Babylonian and Kassite records...

In it we can read that the dead were served with food (grain) and drink (water) offerings not only during their funeral ceremonies, but also regularly thereafter, at least once a month, and in some cases possibly even every day...

There were also two festival dedicated to the dead ancestors with big feasts in which the living ate and drank with the dead. I will talk about these in my next thread.

Importantly, the dead were kept fed and watered because otherwise they would get angry...

Neither Petra M. Creamer nor Akio Tsukimoto explain why feeding and watering the dead was soo important to the Mesopotamians and kind of punishment by the angry dead were they afraid of. But I did, in my post "The house of bones".

In it I talked about the mystery of the missing bones of the Hittite royals. And I proposed that the bones were taken by the Hittites with them, when they abandoned their capital Hattusa, because they wanted to be able to continue to sacrifice food and drink to the dead...

Just like the Chaldean king Meredach, who, when he fled from Babylon to Elam, in front of the advancing forces of Sargon, "took with him all the gods of the land and all the bones of his ancestors from their graves"...

And I explained that the Hittites, just like their Mesopotamian and Elamite contemporaries, remembered their dead and sacrificed food and water to them regularly, because forgotten, hungry and thirsty dead ancestors will take revenge on their living descendants...

And one of the ways they would do that is by causing droughts, storms, floods and other natural disasters that would cause grain crops to fail, and would result in famine and the death of the living...

Eeeee where did you get this idea? From here: Serbs and other Balkan Slavs believed that if the dead were not given water, they would drink it from the clouds, and would cause drought. I talked about this in my article "Thirst", "White feast"...

Serbian belief system, according to ethnographers, was based on the cult of the dead. They regularly shared food and drink with their dead. And they even took the bones of their dead with them, when they were forced to move due to wars or famines. I talked about this in "The house of bones".

BTW, this belief in the world of the dead being a thirsty place seems to have been widespread in the past.

Ghandara culture graves, Pakistan, 1200-800BC...The drinking vessels were placed in graves with drink "for the other world"...I talked about this in my post "One for the road".

But how could Serbian/South Slavic folklore help us understand the Hittite culture?

Serbs, like all the other Balkan people, are descendants of pretty much everyone who ever lived in the Balkans...Which is why, I thought then, and still think, we can find so many interesting bits of many old lores in Serbian folklore...

Anyway, back to the Hittites. Remember this depressed dude? This is the statue of the Last Hittite king Suppiluliuma II. And he said: "...humiliation of the Hittite kingdom is the result of the fact that the Hittites have forgotten to respect the sacred bond with their dead..."

He then promises in the name of the Hittite kings and in the name of his subjects that they will do everything in their power to rebuild this sacred bond again...

But that was too little too late...The Hittite empire collapsed, their capital Hattusa was abandoned and Hittite royals disappeared from the face of the world...Together with the bones of their ancestors...

It turns out, that I was right about the reason for the Hittite empire collapse. According to this recent article from Nature, "Severe multi-year drought [my comment: caused by the angry ancestors] coincided with Hittite collapse around 1198–1196 BC"...

BTW, this is not the only thing found in Serbian/Slavic folklore that I used to unlock the secrets of much older, seemingly unrelated cultures. I discovered the key for unlocking the secrets of ancient animal calendar markers among the Serbian/Slavic snake and goat folklore...

If it wasn't for that, we would still be looking at all these animals depicted on all these ancient artefacts, and talked about in all these ancient myths, legends, folk stories, without having a clue what they mean...

Anyway, I might one day give you the chronology of the discovery of each animal calendar marker and what helped me figure it out. If anyone cares...

I will stop here. This is just an intro into much more important thread about the Sumerian "Zadušnice" festivals of the dead 🙂