ed in the _Descent of Ishtar_: Hammurabi (ca. 2000 B.C.)
invokes the curses of the gods on any one who shall destroy the tablet
of his penal code, and wishes that such a one may be deprived of pure
water after death. In regard to the South Arabians, the pre-Mohammedan
North Arabians, and the Aramaeans, we have no information; and for the
Phoenicians there is only the suggestion involved in the curse invoked
on those who violate a tomb, and in the funeral ceremonies.[168] But the
same general religious ideas prevailed throughout the ancient Semitic
area, and we may probably assume that the Hebrew conception was the
universal one.

+80+. In Egypt, India, China, Persia, Greece, Rome, however, and among
the Jews in the Greek period,[169] higher ethical conceptions were
carried over to the Underworld; judgment, it was held, was pronounced on
the dead, and rewards and punishments dealt out to them according to
their moral character. The Jews and the Persians went a step further,
and conceived of a final general judgment, a final winding-up of human
history, and a permanent reconstruction of the world on a basis largely
moral, though tinged with local religious elements--a grandiose idea
that has maintained itself up to the present time, embodying the
conviction that the outcome of life depends on character, and that
ethical retribution is the essence of the world.

+81+. This ethical constitution of the life hereafter led to the local
separation of the good from the bad. Such a separation was imagined by
comparatively undeveloped peoples whose ethical principle was chiefly
ritualistic, as, for example, the Fijians, the American Indians, and by
civilized peoples in their early stages, the Vedic Hindus[170] (Yama's
abode in the sky, and a pit) and the Greeks (the Homeric Elysian Fields,
and Tartarus).[171]

+82+. In fact, a recognition of a place of happiness and a place of
punishment in the other life accompanies sooner or later a certain stage
of ethical culture in all communities. In India it appears in the late
Vedic and post-Vedic periods, together with the ethical doctrine of
metempsychosis, and though, as is natural in such a stage of
development, various ideas are held respecting the destinies of the good
and the bad, the ethical distinction between these classes of persons,
with a systematic awarding of rewards and punishments, becomes firmly
established: Yama becomes an ethical judge. In the Brahmanas, Manu, and
th