"The deities of the Mesopotamian pantheon are deities of the living, who reward the good, i.e. pious men, and punish the bad, the impious, precisely during their lives. The reward consists, as appears from the prayers of many monarchs to their patron gods, above all in a long prosperous life not saddened by disease, in a happy old age and in numerous posterity; the punishment, in being deprived of these gifts of divine benevolence: the wicked was the mockery of the evil spirits, who tormented him with every sort of infirmity before giving him the mortal blow. But if the ideas of the Babylonian-Assyrians on the course of earthly life with respect to the condition of the good and the bad are, as can be seen, very simple and clear, the same cannot be said of their notions regarding the future life: about which the texts are silent almost at all. It was believed in the immortality of the soul, and that it felt the pain of separation from the body more, if it was mistreated or left unburied. However, there is no mention of the fate of the soul depending on the annihilation or the persistence of the body itself in the tomb. (pp. 154-155)"
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