Sumerians believed every soul, good or bad, went to a cavern where dust was food
In Sumerian belief heaven belonged to the gods alone. When anyone died, saint or scoundrel, their spirit went down to Kur, a cold, dark cavern ruled by the goddess Ereshkigal, where the only thing to eat was dry dust. It is a bleak afterlife, imagined by the first literate civilization on record.
Sumer, in what is now Iraq, credited its gods with running both nature and society. Before kingship, its city-states were effectively theocracies led by high priests called En or Ensi, with female counterparts called Nin, who lived in the temple complexes and managed essentials such as irrigation. Around 2500 BC military kings, the lugals, whose title combines man and big, took over, and political power moved to separate palaces, though priests kept great influence. Some cities even worshipped their kings as gods.
Temples grew with the civilization, from small raised single rooms to terraced multi-room complexes and finally ziggurats, tall pyramid-like structures with sanctuaries on top. Worship could be lavish: under the Third Dynasty of Ur, Lagash reportedly kept sixty-two lamentation priests backed by 180 singers and musicians.
The cosmos was a closed dome floating in a primordial salt sea, with a freshwater ocean called the Abzu beneath the earth. The main creation account, from the prologue of the poem Gilgamesh, Enkidu, and the Netherworld, begins with Nammu, the primeval waters, who bore An, the sky, and Ki, the earth. Their son Enlil, god of wind and storm, pried them apart and took the earth for himself. Venus was Inanna, goddess of love and war, the sun her brother Utu and the moon their father Nanna. Some Sumerians even thought salt and minerals were alive and capable of thought.
Myths circulated orally until writing arrived; cuneiform was at first mostly for bookkeeping, and religious texts such as temple hymns and incantations called nam-shub only became common in the late Early Dynastic period. The scholar Annette Zgoll has argued that the divine powers the texts call Me were rituals central to Mesopotamian culture. Sumerian ideas lived on among Akkadians, Babylonians and Assyrians, and comparative mythologists see parallels with early stories in the Hebrew Bible.
Source: Sumerian religion
