The First Ghosts: Most Ancient of Legacies

by Irving Finkel

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.