Those who equip the dead with some of the things that were of use and delight to the living must believe that the departed soul preserves a certain energy and power of enjoyment, though a gloomy poet among them may enlarge impressively on the emptiness of death. The unknown Assyrian king who describes in an inscription the sumptuous burial that he gave his father may not have been of the same mind as the poet of the Ishtar-epic concerning the laws of the Queen of Hell: “Within the grave The secret place In kingly oil I gently laid him. The grave-stone Marketh his resting-place. With mighty bronze I sealed its [entrance], I protected it with an incantation. Vessels of gold and silver, Such as my father loved, All the furniture that befitteth the grave, The due right of his sovereignty, I displayed before the Sun-God, And beside the father who begat me, I set them in the grave. Gifts unto the princes, Unto the spirits of the earth And unto the gods who inhabit the grave, I then presented.”[210.1] What is the meaning of the act of exposing the gold and silver vessels to the sun-god Shamash before placing them on the grave? Was it done to purify them by the aspect of the pure god and thus to fit them for the use {211} of the glorified dead? The evidence of the deification of kings has been collected above. But the ceremony in question is unique, as far as I am aware. No doubt in ordinary Semitic burials there was great variety in the grave-offerings: in the graves of Gezer in Palestine, weapons, jewels, ostrich-eggs, seals, scarabs, amulets, small figures in human or animal form have been found.[211.1]