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

by Irving Finkel

this case, where Enkidu’s Netherworld identity is so significant, the Akkadian editor spelled the telling word utukku syllable by syllable, just to make sure we notice: ó-tuk-ku.

This suggests, compellingly, that one or other of Enkidu’s parents was divine, which imposes a new factor to our understanding of the Gilgamesh Epic.

have seen in the finished epic was two-thirds a god (from his mother Ninsun), and one-third mortal, and this probably explains the intimate attraction and bond between...

Sumerian god Enki was Enkidu’s father. This explains the reiterated epithet Father Enki in the Sumerian

that Enki went down to the Netherworld to claim – and bed – his bride.

was called Father. To the Mesopotamian this would be nothing startling, for his very name Enki-du means ‘Enki-creator’, and the increasingly common style of writing it, already known in the second millennium bc, employs the telling Sumerian sign dù, ‘to create’, to express the final syllable of Enkidu’s name.

son’. The udug or utukku is invariably malevolent and antipathetic to mankind. Enkidu, however, is no evil demon.

two of the most important Netherworld gods are described as udugs. One is Nergal, well known in this chapter, later consort of Queen Ereshkigal;

Then messenger Namtar, equally a Netherworld luminary, is described in a spell against migraine as ‘the great udug-demon of the grave,

That explains why he could not go down to the Netherworld himself to rescue his game equipment, and why, once in the Netherworld after his own demise and promoted from mortal king to Netherworld judge, Gilgamesh was a prime eṭemmu among eṭemmus, like his blood parents, and not an utukku.

The great mass of unstoppable utukku demonic elements that troubled the human race, however, came up freely from the Netherworld and were reluctantly sent back to the Netherworld by the magic powers of exorcists,

There is another point. Readers who care for ghosts, and even purchase books to read about them, are often looking for ghost stories.

but it would be a dispirited sceptic who would deny that it is, in some measure, a corking good Mesopotamian ghost story of a sort.

This human being, Kummaya by name, is, accordingly, the sole individual in the Mesopotamian record who went to the Netherworld, the Land-of-no-Return, and came back (even if the whole matter was only a dream).

For that Guinness-Book reason alone he would merit our serious attention, but it is his own words, intense and realistic, that make this composition so extraordinary. Kummaya is a royal prince, son of an Assyrian king. Once we have read his Netherworld ghost story we will confront, as cushioned stay-at-home detectives, two important questions: who is Kummaya and who the king? Quite a three-pipe problem.

And there were sumptuous Chicago-style banquets paid for by light-fingered tax operations, so eventually the people began to mutter and vociferate in protest.

Perhaps it was the sight of that dead pig carried hung from a pole through the streets that made Kummaya anticipate his own demise: unclean, overfed and bloated, exposed to all and sundry,

promising to ‘rotate the pig’:

will turn the pig upside-down and you

corresponds to our ‘to turn over a new leaf’,

The crucial husband and wife team, Nergal’s intelligence unit, already familiar to us in the day-to-day running of the Netherworld.

8. Ghost (eṭemmu) had an ox’s head; his four hands and feet being of a human. 9. Evil Spirit (utukku) had a lion’s head; his hands and feet being those of an anzû-eagle.

home Mesopotamian parallel to this post-mortem description. This august corpse is called Proud Shepherd, echoing the phrase earlier of the reigning king.

seen ghosts in the Netherworld, everywhere, doing just that. Then comes the well-established literary idea (favoured also by the Hebrew prophets) that a human being, released from peril thanks to a benevolent god, must devote his time thereafter to telling everybody what happened.

the light of this we understand for certain that Kummaya, Royal Prince and Netherworld Adventurer and the dodgy scribe are two distinct individuals.

I submit that this is Urad-Gula, son of Adad-shuma-uṣur.

king is referred to as the ‘Shepherd’, and the matching epithet ‘Proud Shepherd’ is used of the dead king lying in state in the Netherworld. It is this dead king

Nergal has brought up the idea that the body is that of King Sennacherib (705–681 bc),

The only logical conclusion from all this is that Kummaya must be another of Esarhaddon’s sons.

the light of this, accordingly, I propose that Kummaya is the nickname for Prince Shamash-metu-uballiṭ, and the understanding ‘Instead-of-sort-of-Chap’, implied by the by-name Kummaya, might incorporate this very point.

On the other hand, maybe he exemplified this Holmesian dictum:

complex Netherworld Visit ritual within the Nergal temple readily accessible to the Assyrian court.

for each statue to be named and rendered honour by the trembling visitor.

Reading between the awful lines of Nergal’s address, it appears that he pardons Kummaya, saves him from perdition, and sends him out through the gate of Life back to the human world.

purgative Assyrian spiritual ritual in

attention must be drawn to the astonishing Oracle of the Dead, a vast subterranean replica of the Greek Underworld, that was discovered at Baia in southern Italy by Robert Paget in 1962,

is important to stress again that there is here no anticipation of the post-mortem choice between Heaven and Hell (on the basis of behaviour and sin) that subsequently worked its way into the world; the decision concerns, on the contrary, whether the penitent individual should be pardoned and continue to live – even if under strict supervision – or die and pass into the Netherworld proper.

Likpuru, however, is no human being but a full-sized, human-headed, winged-bull šēdu

the Gate of the Netherworld

The purchaser of the land is Ḫarḫanda, another winged-bull šēdu,

called the Gate of the Netherworld.

Lipugu is on protective duty at the Netherworld Gate itself, and Ḫarḫanda, his brother, at the outer Gatehouse to the Nergal temple complex. Land, for unknown reasons, is passing one from the other.

Urad-Gula was a desperate man and that Kummaya’s public and noisy character, with the court embarrassment he would have caused, lent itself to his inventive and crafty mind.

intimé

Urad-Gula would also be in a position to concoct a customised ritual of Netherworld type, with a malleable stooge under his control

ghost had to be brought up from below

no one could be sure who or what would arrive or just how easy it might be to send them back again.

Necromancy – the art of summoning up the dead to learn what the future will bring – was one of many fortune-telling techniques in ancient Mesopotamia.

first glimpse of the practice of necromancy anywhere in the world occurs in a private cuneiform letter in Akkadian excavated

Assyrian royal court and power centre at Nineveh in the seventh century bc. In fact, the letter was almost certainly written in 669