There was also a weekly Sabattu or "Sabbath," on the 1st, 7th, 14th, 21st, and 28th days of the month, as well as on the 19th, the last day of the seventh week from the beginning of the previous month.

The Sabbath is described as "a day of rest for the heart," and all work upon it was forbidden.

The king was not allowed to change his dress, to ride in his chariot, or even to take medicine, while the prophet himself was forbidden to utter his prophecies.
The mass of the people looked forward to a dreary existence beyond the grave.

The shades of the dead flitted like bats in the darkness of the under-world, hungry and cold, while the ghosts of the heroes of the past sat beside them on their shadowy thrones, and Allat, the mistress of Hades, presided over the warders of its seven gates.

The Sumerians had called it "the land whence none return," though in the theology of Eridu and Babylon Asari or Merodach was already a god who, through the wisdom of his father Ea, "restored the dead to life." But as the centuries passed, new and less gloomy ideas grew up in regard to the future life.
In a prayer for the Assyrian king the writer asks that he may enjoy an endless existence hereafter in "the land of the silver sky," and the realms of the gods of light had been peopled with the heroes of Babylonian literature at an early date.
The belief in Hades went back to those primitive ages when the Sumerians of Eridu conceived of the earth as floating on the deep, which surrounded it as a snake with its coils, while the sky covered it above like an extinguisher, and was supported on the peak of "the mountain of the world," where the gods had their abode.