(2600 BC) When the death of a man comes the summation of what he has done is made. He will be buried as one who is despised in the necropolis, and the lock of hair is turned into something vile. His rest will be a punishment of the god, his sins will be made clear.
Dots under the skull are binary for “friends?”. This has nothing to do with the puzzle.
At the bottom in gray font there are names of publishers with extra letters. The extra letters are the letters you would need to add to the real publishers name to partially anagram to RED HERRING. This plus the gray font that this isn't used to solve. It was just a way to get us thinking about books.
Next there are titles of people in gray font so once again for information only. Combining these with the names in black font we get the following names:
Sir Thomas More
Baron Edgar Adrian
Queen Penelope of Sparta
Professor Philip Zimbardo
We use this to get the correct last letter for the name of an author. Each author has a book with the word DEATH in the title. The word DEATH will land in the double blank.
Thomas Mann - DEATH in Venice
Edgar Allan Poe - The Masque of the Red DEATH
Penelope Sky - Buttons and DEATH
Philip Ziegler - The Black DEATH
Taking a main word from each title other than DEATH we get a list of words all describing the same thing.
Venice, Masque, Buttons, Black
These words refer to a Venetian mask called a moretta which is the password for the pastebin.