How Different Peoples Imagined the Afterlife

For the Egyptians, the dead entered the Fields of Iaru - eternal reed fields with abundant harvests. They still had to work there: ushabtis, worker figurines placed in tombs, would answer the call in their owner's place at harvest time. A people dependent on the Nile's floods imagined eternity as a perfect field.

For the Sumerians and Babylonians, it was the opposite. Their afterlife was the "land of no return," a house of dust: the dead sat in darkness, dressed in feathers like birds, and ate clay. Everyone was the same, king and water carrier alike. No reward, no punishment - just dry, dusty land like the land around them.

Norse Valhalla is like a war band: battle every day, feasting in the evening, wounds healed by morning. Greek Hades, meanwhile, is an asphodel meadow where frail, nearly memoryless shades wander. The Greeks found their afterlife so bleak that one of their own heroes described it best.

In the house of dust, no one asks how you lived. In Egypt, they do: at judgment, your heart is placed on one pan of a scale and the feather of the goddess Ma'at on the other. In China, the afterlife is organized like a government office: judges, registers, deadlines - the earthly empire and its officials, reproduced below. The schedule is bureaucratic too: the first judgments take place every seventh day, and relatives commemorate the dead on those dates.

For the Aztecs, morality did not decide your fate - the way you died did: those who fell in battle and died in childbirth went to the sun, while those who drowned went to the rain god. Everyone else faced a long journey to Mictlan - an obstacle course, by all accounts.

The difference between "judged" and "not judged" is not random: elaborate postmortem reward and punishment is more common in large societies, where thousands of strangers live side by side and neighbors can no longer keep watch. Which came first - large societies or gods who monitor morality - remains unresolved: a major analysis of historical databases argued that such gods appeared only after societies became more complex, but the paper was retracted after criticism.