초록 열기/닫기 버튼
People of the Ancient West Asian/Mesopotamian Culture believedthat a human being continued her/his postmortem life as a ghost orspirit, and their funerary customs were well developed in relation tothis belief. The purpose of this essay is to explore Ancient WestAsian literary sources that depict the underworld and afterlife, toexamine the thought behind words and expressions of thedocuments, and to search for the mutual relationship among them. In order to pursue the research questions, the myths of ‘Descentof Inanna/Ishtar to Underworld,’ ‘Nergal and Ereshkigal,’ and ‘ErraEpic’ will be studied. Narratives such as ‘Death of Ur-Nammu andhis Descent to Underworld,’ ‘Vision of Underworld of an AssyrianPrince,’ and ‘Gilgamesh Epic’ will also be inspected for theresearch. The contents of these works will be interpreted with the categories, the geographic understanding of the underworld, the image of death, the life of the dead, the return of the dead onto this world, other inhabitants of the underworld, and the judgementafter death. No particular hermeneutic tool will be applied but theanalysis of the text itself. Some depictions of the underworld draw it as an opposite placeto the land of the living, but others portrait it as a quite similarplace but a flip side of this world. The two groups of expressionsseem to be in conflict and cannot be harmonized, but they also canbe interpreted by the name of diversity and development through theages. The sentences that describe the underworld as a similar placeto the land of the living belong to documents composed in relativelylater periods, so a certain development can be observed from theOld Babylonian Period when Sumerian was losing its ground as anofficial language and Akkadian was gaining its authority togetherwith the rise of Amorite Dynasties in Ancient West Asia.
키워드열기/닫기 버튼
Ancient West Asia, underworld, afterlife, death, literary image
