In these practices the primitive Hellene and Semite were on the same level, nor is it likely that either was the pupil of the other. One important difference, important at least for our purpose, we can mark, which is connected with the difference between Hellenic and Oriental climate. The Hellenic ghost might take water among his offerings, and the neglected soul might be pitied for being ἄνυδρος[211.2]; he might also eat his porridge in the Anthesteria; but he preferred wine, and the offerings of blood--the αἱμακουρία--and especially the sacrifice of animals. And we may gather from the painting on the Phaistos sarcophagus that the blood-oblation to the dead was part of the pre-Hellenic ritual in Crete. The triple-libation, also, that Homer mentions, of wine, honey-mead, and water, and which the later Greeks retained, may be regarded as a Minoan tradition, for its great antiquity among the Aegean people is attested by the libation-table found by Sir Arthur Evans in the cave of Zeus on Mount Dickte. Here there is no trace of the teaching of the Babylonian priest: nor in the blood-offerings to the dead. For the Babylonian ghost, parched with thirst in the intolerable heat of Mesopotamia, craved not blood--which, as far as I know, is never mentioned in the description of his funeral-rites--but {212} beer in the earliest period,[212.1] and in the later specially water. It is water that was supposed to make the deceased comparatively happy: “On a couch he lieth And drinketh pure water, The man who was slain in battle. His father and his mother [support] his head, And his wife [kneeleth] at his side.”[212.2] This is the lore that in the Epic of Gilgamesh is imparted to the hero by the ghost of his beloved Eabani, concerning the advantages of the man who gets due burial over him whose corpse is thrown out into the field, and whose soul wanders restlessly eating “the dregs of the vessel, the leavings of the feast, and that which is cast out upon the street.” The spirit’s need of water has been an ancient tradition of Semitic grave-tendance. It is expressed on one of the cylinders of Gudea;[212.3] and in the Curse of Hammurabi, which is a postscript to his code of laws, he swears that if a man breaks them “his spirit in the world below shall lack water.”[212.4] Clay-cylinders in the museums of Paris and Berlin, that doubtless come from Mesopotamian graves, contain inscriptions expressing a blessing on the man who respects the dead, “may his departed spirit in the world below drink clear water.”[212.5] The old idea survives in the belief of modern Islam that the soul of the dead yearns for nothing so much as that the rains or dews of heaven should fall refreshingly on the grave. These simple differences in the oblations incline {213} us to suppose that the primitive grave-ritual of Greece was developed independently of Babylon.