The First Ghosts: Most Ancient of Legacies

by Irving Finkel

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.