It was the same with another species of demon, the _ekimmu_, which hovered around the tomb and attacked the loins of those who fell in its way. But the _ekimmu_ was a being whose origin was known. It was the spirit of an unburied corpse over whose unsanctified remains the funeral rites had never been performed. The mystic ceremonies and magical words which consigned the dead to their last resting-place had been neglected, and the hapless spirit was left unprovided with the talismans that would enable him to cross the river of death, or join his comrades in the passive tranquillity of the lower world. Restlessly, therefore, it wandered about the desert places of the earth, finding at times a shelter in the bodies of the living, whom it plagued with sore diseases, and seeking to satiate its hunger under the cover of night with the refuse it could pick up "in the street." The food and drink which pious hands laid in the tomb were denied to the tombless ghost, and it had to search for them where it could. The Epic of Gilgames concludes with a description of it, which paints in vivid colours the old Babylonian belief--
"He whose body lies forsaken in the field, As thou and I alike have seen, His _ekimmu_ rests not in the earth. He whose _ekimmu_ has none to care for him, As thou and I alike have seen, The garbage of the pot, the refuse of food, Which is thrown into the street, must he eat."
It is no wonder that a Babylonian king prays that the body of his enemy may be "cast aside, and no grave allowed to him,"(227) or that Assur-bani-pal should have torn the bodies of the Elamite kings from their tombs at Susa. Sennacherib similarly desecrated the burial-places of the ancestors of Merodach-baladan; and one of the oldest of Babylonian monuments, the so-called Stela of the Vultures, depicts the bodies of the slaughtered enemy exposed to the vultures that feed upon them, while the slain Babylonians themselves are buried by their companions under a tumulus of earth.
The _ekimmu_ was thus, properly speaking, the ghost of the unburied corpse; whereas the _utukku_ was the ghost of a corpse which had obtained burial, but through some accident or other had escaped from the realms of the dead. While, therefore, the _ekimmu_ necessarily had a human origin, the _utukku_ was only accidentally a human ghost. The rites with which its body had been laid in the grave, ought to have confined it to the underground regions of the dead; and the "pure water" and food with which it had been provided were sufficient to sustain it in its existence below. If it returned to the upper world it could only have been through the arts of the necromancer, and the sufferings it may have inflicted upon men were but the revenge it took for being disturbed. The _utukku_, like the _lil_, belonged to a class of supernatural beings who manifested their presence in a particular way, and it was only as it were accidentally that the ghost of a dead man came to be included among them.