The First Ghosts: Most Ancient of Legacies

by Irving Finkel

Taking ghosts for granted in daily life and interacting with them was to be ever after a characteristic shared with peoples and nations round about the world, ancient into modern; it is precisely that which makes documentation of the ghost-belief system in ancient Mesopotamia over four thousand years ago so vital and significant. It is astonishing, in fact, how familiar the long-dead of archaeology emerge to us in this regard. The cynical process of second-guessing the meaning of evidence from antiquity serves no one; my conviction is that the voices that cried out about their ghosts, argued with them and battled against them over nearly three millennia of texts in cuneiform writing must be taken at face value and hearkened to. The important judgement is that their ghosts are not symbols or metaphors but, in their lives, realities.

A population stretching out to the remote, ill-lit horizon in every direction, gated in the dust, hunched over with their wings wrapped about them, waiting and waiting in unending blackness and despondency like depressed and inscrutable penguins. And the local regimen? Dust and clay, with extra dust, perhaps, for any young Olivers asking for more. It sounds, in the modern expression, like hell. But this is not Hell in opposition to Heaven, for no forked choice between reward or punishment awaited the Mesopotamians; they arrived too early in history. The conception is like one of those little-ease Tower-of-London nightmares: as described, it is, for a human being, nothing more than eternal uncomfortable punishment. Such a destiny is hard for us to accept as that which Mesopotamian Man really had in mind as his eyes grew dim and life drew to a close, even when our own sensibilities are blunted by the frightful prospects that later religions imposed on Later Humanity. There was the one outcome, and good or bad behaviour when alive made not a whit of difference. All men died equal.

While common beliefs about death and dying were undoubtedly shared across the population, urban to rustic, they endured without support from, or overlapping with, writing. The Netherworld narratives, in this respect, are the direct opposite. They are venerable and literary, and dependent for their being known exclusively on the work of the scribal schools. There they were read and copied out, partly for their own sake and partly as exercise material in mastering literary Sumerian and the writing of its grammar. Of course, individuals among the unwashed and illiterate might know of the stories in outline, or have heard them recited, or have experienced something of them, but only a very slim minority of persons went to school, learned to read and write, and went on their way educated in the classics. The likelihood is that the population at large had but the sketchiest knowledge of the Netherworld literature and its properties that loom so large to us today. Ancient scholars and other individuals may have reflected philosophically on such matters and wondered this way and that, but, if so, there is no echo of it within our grasp.

In Chapter 8 it has been stressed that there is a perfectly intelligible chasm between the image of the Netherworld presented by literature and that implied by burial customs and grave goods. The strong literary tradition of the Netherworld Descents and sort of scene that greeted the new arrival cannot, however, be brushed under the carpet as unrealistic or non-authoritative in its context. The accumulative impression one gets of the Mesopotamian Netherworld is that it was a bit of a railway terminus; everyone is waiting around interminably, in a particularly intense kind of despair, for it is never articulated what they are waiting for.

As we have seen, ghosts – the spirits of the dead – have walked by our side since the beginning of our time. They are there in our first ancient writings, and can be suspected, or glimpsed, far earlier than that; while the human ideas, brought out of the ground dressed in cuneiform to have life breathed into them, reflect a belief system that will be intelligible, accessible and even familiar to any modern reader who has interest in the subject. Our story has brought us from the shady beginnings to the edge of the classical world, the terrain of the three great monotheistic religions, and the beginning of successive new ages of ideas, theories and philosophies. Ghosts beyond Mesopotamia known to the Egyptians, the Greeks and the Romans can claim their counterparts ever after right across the span of the world; it is a simple matter to demonstrate the universal presence of ghosts in people’s minds and lives, dreams and writings.