Mesopotamian religion offered its dead no meaningfully differentiated afterlife. Whether a person had lived virtuously or wickedly, ruled a city or swept its streets, Irkalla awaited everyone alike: a dim, dust filled realm beneath the earth, entered through the western horizon and never left. Surviving descriptions, above all in the poem Inanna's Descent to the Underworld and in the flood hero Gilgamesh's vision of the afterlife near the end of his own epic, dwell on the bleakness of the place rather than on any system of reward or punishment. The dead are described as wearing feathers like birds, eating dust and clay in place of bread, and living in darkness under the rule of the goddess Ereshkigal, Inanna's older sister, who governs the realm from a palace of lapis lazuli guarded by a gatekeeper, Neti, and a council of seven terrifying judges, the Anunnaki of the underworld.
This is a notably different picture from later, more developed afterlife theologies elsewhere in the ancient Near East and in Egypt, and it left Mesopotamian religious energy focused correspondingly less on securing a good afterlife than on maintaining the goodwill of the living gods and on the practical rites, offerings of food and drink poured out for the dead by their descendants, that were thought to keep a shade's existence in Irkalla from becoming even more miserable through neglect.