Feeding the Family Dead

Given Irkalla's bleakness, the burden of easing a dead relative's existence there fell on the living, and kispu was the ritual mechanism by which that obligation was met. On a fixed schedule, most consistently at the new moon and again on other set festival days through the month, the head of a household set out offerings of bread, water or beer and other food for deceased ancestors, poured a libation, and spoke the ancestor's name aloud, an act treated as no less essential to the rite than the food itself, since a dead person whose name went unspoken was believed to fade into a more anonymous and more miserable class of ghost. Texts describe the obligation running specifically through a family's male line, typically falling to the eldest son as the person responsible for maintaining his father's memory and material comfort in the afterlife.

The rite was not confined to private households. Administrative and literary texts document kispu offerings maintained for deceased kings, sometimes stretching back through a dynasty's full royal line, treated as a state obligation comparable to temple offerings for the living gods. A special expanded form of kispu accompanied the monthly new moon and the Mesopotamian festival calendar's recurring commemorations of the dead more broadly, occasions on which the offerings extended beyond a single family's own ancestors to the wider community of the dead.