Note 218.1 — Chapter XII · Eschatologic Ideas of East and West.

But no evidence has as yet been gathered that the ordinary Babylonian expected any such distinguished lot. Nor does it appear that prayers were ever offered for his soul, as they might be for the king’s, and as they habitually were for the ordinary Athenian’s in the Anthesteria. For the Babylonian, on the whole, the only distinction of lot between one person and another after death was between him whose ghost was well cared for by surviving relatives and him who died an outcast and was neglected. And this was no moral distinction, nor one that was likely to engender the belief in a righteous judgment. The duty to the dead was a family duty merely; nor can I find in the Mesopotamian records any indication of that tender regard of the alien dead which leads in Greece to a certain higher morality, and which informs Homer’s pregnant phrase—“it is not righteous to vaunt oneself over the slain.” We find Assyrian kings revenging themselves by mutilation and exposure of their enemies’ corpses;218.1 and Semitic ferocity and Hellenic αἰδώς are nowhere more vividly contrasted than in this matter.