A Grave Goods Guide For The Difficult to Shop For and Recently Deceased

“Oh, I don’t need anything. The gods will understand."”

“I’m sure I can sort it out if I need anything once I get there. Probably loads of people don’t take anything with them to the afterlife.”

“Don’t waste your money — grave robbers will probably just steal it later, and it will be worse having had something and then losing it in the afterlife.”

“You know me, I like to travel light, hah hah.”

“I don’t even use the potsherds I have now.”

We’ve all heard this before from someone we love – our sister who never uses the combs and beads we procure for her during raiding parties, our father-in-law who insists you’re just “wasting” good oil when you try to anoint his hair before battle, our neighbor Sauromatio the Giftless who tries to give away all his horses after contracting phthisis. They’re hard enough to shop for while they’re living!

But as much as they may insist they “really don’t need anything” after they’ve died, you and I both know that what our friends and relatives take with them into the afterlife is a reflection on us, too. Imagining descending below the roots of Abzû, past the seven gates of Neti, and arriving before the Anunnaki, only to see your most feckless cousin hovering behind their ashen thrones, asking if you have a comb he can borrow, having been unable to attend to his hair these last fifteen years.

Or arriving yourself in the House of Dumuzi, suitably turned-out and appearing most conscientiously, with servants and grain and wine of your own, that you need not be ashamed of your poverty — only to find your father-in-law, the one who goes on journeys without preparing his luggage aforehand, squatting just outside your gate? You will have to provide for him, unless you wish to eat dust and drink shame all the days of your death, and then what will be left for you? Half, and less than half, of all your carefully-provisioned stores, and they will have to do for you forever!

No; we cannot let those we love travel out of this world empty-handed, no matter how much they protest. On the other hand, of course, it does no good to anger the dead unnecessarily. You would not wish, for example, to arrive in the Breathless Lands to find all who have predeceased you angry at your presumption:

“Look at the junk you have burdened me with in my death! Was it for this I leapt in front of the Cretan bull to spare your worthless life? Your wine-casks are thin and sour!”

“How will you make this right with me, when your clay tablets are of such inferior quality that my hands are torn to ribbons?”

“That horse you slew at my feet has no wind! It plagues me with the commonest of stable vices, its shins are worthless, there is no grace in his feet! A she-goat would have been better, for I could have drawn milk and wool from her, but I shall curse the burden you have fastened round my neck forevermore.”

And yet they must have something. We recommend the following, to minimize the odds they will need to sponge off of you after your own death:

• Gold. Even those who do not like gifts will rarely turn down gold, in our experience. If they do not want it for themselves, they can nevertheless use it to bribe Lamashtu, the lady of Pain, into desisting from her torment

• An “experience” gift, such as a necklace that can summon gallu-demons, or a wishing-pot that they can use to wish for other items

• Linen is always useful

• A small animal like a chicken (a horse is too intimate and particular a gift, unless you know someone’s taste in horses very well, but a quiet, out-of-the-way chicken buried under the deceased’s right side can be very useful indeed, and indicate to the gate-gods that they are dealing with a ghost of some property and not a beggar)

• Cords or nets or reed hawsers

• A modest handheld weapon, like a double-headed axe or club, which the deceased might use to relieve other spirits of their property. This saves you the anxiety of having to find something for them, since they will be able to steal whatever they like best

• A pillow (you will need one!!)

• A plain libation, since the only other drink in the Underworld is dust

• A scribe or singer to entertain them, or to help manage their affairs

Above all, do not listen to the entreaties of the dying who insist on being buried without grave goods. It is less expensive, in the long run, to fill their tomb with a few offerings of good quality, than it is to send them into the jaws of death portionless!

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