The ancient teacher Enoch (Enmendanki) taught around 3000 BC about what happens after death: Perhaps even before the earliest pyramids. Beliefs concerning the afterlife or underworld have persisted from that time till the present in many civilised cultures with remarkably little diversity. Egyptians with Anubis weighing hearts of souls before determining destinations. Greeks had same concept of underworld with Pluto governing it and of course the river Styx. Sumerians had the underworld as a geographic place with an entrance near Eridu. The Adapa legend sees Adapa entering into the regions of gods by way of a tunnel in a mountain guarded by some of his descendant chief elders. Abraham did not differ in his beliefs on such things and he and his patriarchal grandchildren are recorded as having blessed the Book of Enoch for its teachings. Moses too learned such things and did not contradict them and there is the reference to Azazel who Enoch implied ended up buried in Dudain, which might likely be the desert near where the Exodus took the Israelites so the scapegoat might literally have been sent off towards where Azazel was (is) incarcerated. It seems Enoch’s teachings to a great extent formed the basics of most civilised religions till Roman times. A word used by Hellenistic theists for a destination of the dead was Tartarus and a geographic place (or places) is implied but think how we speak of prison. We say a particular statesman might be in charge of imprisonment or a particular person went to prison or spent some time in prison, without implying any particular place. In some cases it might imply a particular place locally to say you visited the prison. Likewise Tartarus in some contexts might mean a state of incarceration with no specific geographic place implied, as with angel Uriel’s status in charge of Tartarus. This place might not be place of the dead but a place for rogue angels. It could mean spiritual incarcerations generally, whatever the place. Or in the Book of Enoch it (or whatever was later translated as Tartarus in Greek) might imply a specific place known to the contemporaries of Enoch (perhaps because of his teachings). In the case of angels being bound in Tartarus it might again imply prison-like incarceration generally. Yet other contexts might speak of a specific Tartarus, such as Sheol where all the dead are gathered in a partitioned underground complex. So through history roughly the same teachings were persisted by most civilised cultures as exist in early Christianity and contemporary Hebrew and Hellenistic Jewish sects. These beliefs are still present in Christianity and Judaism and indeed Islam, etcetera today but the idea of “going to heaven” after death has somewhat superseded them in popular theistic cultures.
