The Zoroastrians of Iran used to believe in the life after death and they listed details about this life. They enlisted the names of Paradise, Hell, and the Rubicon and believed in categorizing of the damned in Hell which is very similar to how we describe them today.
They believed that Hell was a place of purification and then was the heights of Paradise. All souls must necessarily cross the Rubicon which separates the pure from the damned.
The pure souls reach the land of pleasure, an eternal place and live a life full of pleasures with Ahura Mazda.
But the damned souls cannot cross this bridge and fall into the abyss below which is sectionalized according to the sins, the deeper for the greater sinners etc. (1)
It is just as you have seen and they used to give the details of the life after death.