The Great Below

Question: A question about the Babylonian underworld. Is it a place of torment and damnation like the monothestic hell, or is it just a place where all dead eventually go with no punishment or reward? A quiet, dreary but not horrible place to wait out eternity?

Irkallu is much closer to the second than the first. It's certainly not a place of punishment; there's no element of eventual damnation or paradise to the Babylonian conception of what happens after death. It's merely a final destination; a sort of end-of-the-line holding cell for all the myriad dead.

For the Babylonians, the primary function of the Underworld is to keep dead people in so that they can't venture into the lands of the living. Ghosts of the dead were believed to be capable of very malicious behavior, inflicting bad fortune or sickness on the living if they roamed free, and as such needed somewhere they could be held in order for those who were still alive to be free of their depredations. This is the major reason that funerary rites were important to them; a dead person who didn't get buried was a dead person who might not find their way properly to the Underworld, and thus a menace to everyone around them if they happened to stick around and start reenacting scenes from Poltergeist. It's also the reason that, when Ishtar or Ereshkigal start throwing tantrums and threatening to break down the gates of the place to free the dead, the rest of the gods go to Defcon One until the issue is resolved.

But for the dead themselves, there's no particular good or bad attached to going to the Underworld; you're dead, that's it. A lot of Babylonian funeral hymns stress the idea that death is the great equalizer; a common man and a king both end up in exactly the same place regardless of what they had or were in life (though there are, of course, occasional hymns written specifically for kings where they claim that their status as more beloved by the gods than anyone else might grant them an exception). While Irkallu is pretty uniformly described as dreary, dark and forbidding, no kind of punishment or terrorizing of the dead is ever mentioned. It may not be the most pleasant of places, but it's not a punishment; it's just the inevitable end of the road after the joys of life have ceased.

There are, however, a few interesting mentions of the dead being "judged", usually by Shamash, Sin or Gilgamesh, but what that means and whether it has to do with what they did in life or their behavior in the Underworld itself is an unexplained mystery. Since we don't know of any "punishment" sectors of Irkallu, I'd probably treat these courts and judgments as pertaining to the affairs of the Underworld instead of life before it; after all, if Irkallu has its own entire pantheon of gods that mirror the Anunna in the heavens above as well as more dead people than you could shake a stick at, it probably has more than its share of squabbling to sort out.