The First Ghosts: A rich history of ancient ghosts and ghost stories from the British Museum curator

by Irving Finkel

follow their torturers to the Netherworld.

The outside ghost is befriended and treated like the others: trouble is avoided all round.

Such an experience was no doubt especially unsettling for what Jeeves called the ‘psychology of the individual’,

The reiterative ‘keep-doing’ Babylonian verb form conveys that this is no ghost who might have been half-glimpsed once or twice; it is one that keeps on appearing in the house.

here is a ghost that is really beginning to get on someone’s nerves.

The language is a bizarre kind of Sumerian that would have got poor marks in school, but I think was deliberately made to sound as well as look archaic;

these very ancient utterances correspond to the mumbo-jumbo or abracadabra of our world;

magic words that many know but none comprehend, for their origin and true significance are lost in the time mists. The

āšipu

a preparation of cedar oil, sulphur, algae, bitumen and one or

With this he smears the sufferer’s gate, door, bolt, both sides of his bed, his table and reed mat, and, thanks to this barrier, he will no longer see them.

may baltu-thorn hold you back, may ašāgu-thorn hold you back, may the magic circle hold you back.

This incantation has to be recited seven times while the exorcist pours sweet oil over the two kinds of thorn and the circle, probably of flour, with which the bed has been surrounded.

Roasted grain flour is thrown in front of it and a libation offered.

In this case a small ritual is to be enacted by the river. An area of the bank is swept, and pure water sprinkled. The exorcist has come prepared with a censer to burn juniper, and this is set up. Good beer is libated. It is perhaps at this point that the spell has to be recited by the victim of ghostly persecution.

After that the exorcist pours out three libations of donkey urine from an ox hoof to the ghost who has appeared to the individual and the dead persons will be cut off.

but one can hardly refrain from thinking that the thirsty ghost – for ghosts were always thirsty – might take it for refreshing beer and receive a punitive shock.

abjured by Abatu the Queen, by Ereshkigal the Queen,

They beckon the victim with bony finger to follow them to the Netherworld to join their ranks, to Kutha, where the divine scribe waits to complete his entry in the fateful record.

Queen Abatu, for no person today knows anything about her.

this remark should strike a chord in anyone who has ever had the feeling that something is there, somewhere behind me, watching whatever I do …

Divorcing a dead partner

a ‘person has been chosen as partner by a dead person and the ghost afflicts him’.

From the body of So-and-So be off with you, after your fate! Ghosts, too, have their destiny.

Babylonian exorcists and doctors attributed a good range of symptoms and problems to the attentions of ghosts.

If a person continually suffers from headache and roaring in his ears, his eyes are dim, he has constant pain in his neck, his arms are numb

Many medical problems were attributed to what the Babylonians described as a ‘Hand’, common among which is that called Hand-of-a-Ghost:

šu-gedim-ma in Sumerian, in Akkadian qāt eṭemmi.

The origin of the expression lies in the conception of disease or affliction as a tou...

Ghost-Hand represented a catch-all term for the internal problems thought ultimately to be due to evil or dangerous ghosts.

that ghosts bent on medical malice entered the human body above all via the ear.

Broadly speaking, an intrusive Evil-Panic ghost, male, is to be provided with an alluring ‘wife’, the archetype specimen of Kipling’s ‘rag, and a bone and a hank of hair’. The exorcist’s instructions begin like this:

Eight hundred years later this Bronze Age ritual was still alive and in use in the land of its origin, between the Euphrates and Tigris rivers.

take her Abaknana in place of the afflicted

deliberately reflects the contemporary state image of King Nabonidus,

This may seem a brave claim, and it has world stage implications beyond the question of ghosts and ghosts alone, but evidence supports it,

‘Who has done this, O Sin?’ or,

King Nabonidus the man was a passionate devotee of the moon god Sin,

The king’s lifelong promotion of Sin worship culminated in conflict with the state clergy of the god Marduk at Babylon, and ultimately paved the way for the relatively straightforward takeover of the Babylonian Empire by Cyrus the Great, in 539

This name, Abaknana, could have existed, unnoticed, side by side with his throne name Nabû-na’id (meaning Nabu-is-praised).

Once king, his life’s work was to supplant the Marduk cult with that of the moon god Sin. His

this in mind the appearance of King Abaknana inside this complex ritual for extreme mental disturbance at the hands of intrusive ghosts might find explanation.

To the House of Darkness, the Seat of Irkalla, To the house from where no one who enters can leave To the journey from which there is no going back To the house whose dwellers are deprived of light Where dust is their sustenance, clay their food; They see no light, dwelling in darkness They are clad, like birds, with wings as garments On door and bolt dust gathers.

But if one plays the simple game of imagining oneself an inmate in this House of Gloom, reasonable questions present themselves at once. How could any human being tolerate

unending blackness and despondency like depressed and inscrutable penguins.

sounds, in the modern expression, like hell.

they arrived too early in history.

How, more importantly, can we square this fateful destination with the dedicated ghost literature in its various forms examined in the preceding chapters?

The answer is that Ishtar’s Descent and the related Netherworld compositions prized by us represent literary tradition,

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.