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 {218} 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. Finally, there appears a difference in character between the Mesopotamian and the Hellenic deities who were concerned with the surveillance of the world below. In the religion of the Western people, the latter are as essentially concerned with life as with death; and Demeter, Kore-Persephone, Plouton, Zeus Χθόνιος, are benign divinities whose sombre character is only the reverse of the picture; there is a chance of development for a more hopeful creed when the dead are committed to the care of the gentle earth-goddess: and it was through this double aspect of Demeter-Kore that the eschatologic promise of the Greek mysteries was confirmed. But the Babylonian Queen of Hell, Allatu, is wholly repellent in character and aspect, nor do we find that she was worshipped at all; the only indication of a softer vein in her is the passage in “The Descent of Ishtar,” which describes the sorrow of Allatu for the sufferings brought upon men through the departure of the goddess of life and love. Nergal, who is probably an usurper of the older supremacy of Allatu, has indeed a celestial character {219} as the upper god of Kutha, but even in the upper world his nature was regarded as terrible and destructive. Only once or twice is the gentler Greek conception concerning the rulers of the lower world found in Babylonian literature.[219.1] Enmesharra--a name that may be a synonym for Nergal[219.2]--is hailed as “Lord of Earth, of the land from which none returns (Aralu), great Lord, without whom Ningirsu allows nothing to sprout in field and canal, no growth to bloom.”[219.3] Tammuz himself also is once at least styled “the Lord of the lower world.”[219.4] And if Ningirsu is another name of the underworld-god, which is possible, it is significant that in an old Babylonian document the cultivator of the soil is called “the