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

by Irving Finkel

I have met many persons of honesty and integrity who tell me that they have seen a ghost in the course of their own modern lives and I cannot find a single reason whatsoever to disbelieve them.

Least well known to the historically inclined ghost-hunter are the written works of the Mesopotamians of ancient Iraq: Sumerians, Babylonians and Assyrians. Using their cuneiform inscriptions, we can look in on – for the first time in history – a complete, functional and in no way alien human system that covers death, burial, afterlife and, above all, ghosts. Abundant and surprising details have been preserved in their tablets of clay, almost as if they anticipated our interest to come, millennia after those beleaguered individuals and their spell-brandishing exorcists fell silent in the dust. This book has been written to breathe life into dry bones and install Mesopotamian ghosts firmly on the historical ghost map. They are, quite literally, the first ghosts in human history that we can really speak about, for we can read and understand the Mesopotamians’ own words on the subject today, often more than four thousand years later, from their day-to-day inscriptions excavated out of the ground.

The belief that the dead can return and interact with the living is so extremely deep-seated and so universally distributed throughout time and geography that it could be classified – were we Martian encyclopaedists armed with pencil and notebook – as one clear component of basic humanity.

Crucially, burial is not compelling of itself in our search for ghosts, for there were always many reasons for rapid burial of the dead;

Burial, mourning and group social cohesion in the face of death are not, however, exclusively human territory.

The importance of such evidence is that mourning and burial activity are part of the deep animal world itself, and it is from that remotest of backdrops that pre-human and human ideas have ultimately crystallised.

Undertakers really got to work in the Upper Palaeolithic, let us say 50,000 years ago, when graves and grave goods became commonplace, remaining so, practically speaking, in archaeology ever after. Whoever laid sword or ploughshare next to their father’s stilled right thigh in a leaky dugout knew that this was not the complete end.

whenever graves included goods side by side with the deceased, we are entitled to assume an underlying belief that some part of that individual was believed to be going somewhere. The ‘somewhere’ framework, from its very inception, is inevitably predicated on the idea, hunch-like, sketchy or sharply visualised, of an afterlife.

we can distil for the purposes of this enquiry three evolved strands of human belief. They are interwoven and interdependent to such an extent that one can hardly have prevailed without the others. All three are implied by burial with bits: 1. Something survives of a human being after death. 2. That something escapes the grasp of the corpse and goes somewhere. 3. That something, if it goes somewhere, can quite reasonably be expected to be capable of coming back.

From this vantage point we should reckon that ghosts arrived on stage by the Upper Palaeolithic, perhaps around 50,000 bc. The simple conception that something recognisable of a dead person might at some time return to human society seems to me neither fanciful nor surprising. Its roots originate at that developmental horizon where burial with goods became the norm for the first time.

In contrast to mourning and burial, it is the deep-seated conception that some part of a person does not vanish forever that separates us ab...

It is only the early human mind that grew to strive against the prospect of the final annihilation of self, a hallmark rebellion that became hard-wired into, and always an essential element of, human nature. It is the incalculable antiquity of the first stirrings towards post-mortem existence that explains the enduring and universal belief in ghosts. Ghosts have waited in the wings from the beginning and have fluttered persistently as part of human cultural, religious or philosophical baggage ever since. Practically speaking, as a result, they are inexpungible.

Phase 1 is when every individual in a given society believed in ghosts, not as a matter of faith or defiance, but simply because they were just considered to be part of daily life. It was not, in fact, a question of belief, but of acknowledgment. Here, the world of the ancient Mesopotamians is a perfect example. Phase 2 is when the simplicity of that belief was exposed to and overlaid by religious, philosophical or scientific thinking. This complex of overlay imposed questions, scepticism, outrage and ridicule, eventually reducing the topic to private and chiefly unarticulated belief, but without in any way dislodging its deep-seated hold. Here, modern European society is a perfect example.

long-dead Mesopotamians believed in their ghosts to the point of taking them utterly for granted.

The reader embarking on this book might doubt such a proposition, regarding the supposed seeing of ghosts, cohabiting with them or suffering from them, as the sort of nonsense found everywhere in gossipy or superstitious enclaves, not to be taken seriously, and hardly a significant prop in bringing to life a long-vanished culture. The very opposite, in fact, is true.

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.

The first excavations investigated ancient cities whose names were sometimes echoed in the Bible or in classical authors: Nineveh, Nimrud, Babylon. Their archaeological discoveries were spectacular: palaces and temples, major public buildings, walls and city gates.

After these first heady days, the scientific aims of archaeology steadily broadened out in every direction; the Mesopotamian archaeologist today commands very extensive and diverse data, and is increasingly concerned with the everyday living conditions of the population at large, over many sites and periods. The reach of these sites stretches from remote prehistoric settlements that preserved the most ancient of lifestyles to bustling and sophisticated cities that, in many ways, anticipated those of the Middle East today. Understanding of daily life three thousand years ago, combining archaeology with inscriptions, can be sometimes astonishing in its detail. Ghosts are part of all this.

The Mesopotamians’ crucial words for ghost are thus the first in history; in ancient Sumerian it is gedim, in ancient Babylonian eṭemmu, and we shall have a good look at these terms, for they prove to encapsulate the whole idea of ghosts, forever after, cap-à-pie.

History itself was made when the ancient Sumerians, and after them the Assyrians and Babylonians of ancient Iraq, turned to river clay as support for their young writing, well over five thousand years ago, and they never looked back.

It is with the help of two dead languages, Sumerian and Akkadian, that we can follow the Mesopotamian dead themselves.

Ancient Mesopotamian tradition complements rather beautifully the idea put forward in the previous chapter that ghosts were there from mankind’s very beginning.

We (the god) + ṭēmu (intelligence) = (w)eṭemmu (spirit).

The very stuff of ghosts thus became an inextricable part of the Mesopotamian world life system from Day One on.

Mesopotamian ghosts, in as much as we can glimpse them, were insubstantial and flimsy, but often recognisable, and seemingly clothed. They were sure of a reaction when they did come back.

Sometimes ghosts came back. Sometimes people saw them. Sometimes they were, quite literally, a pain in the neck.

ghosts were not the only such force to be reckoned with in life, for they co-existed side by side with an assortment of other, entirely non-human elements. These were usually invisible, what we typically call devils or demons; evil certainly, with origins that were often obscure but also partly divine.

the complex of Royal Tombs at Ur locates particular features at this time and place – the middle of the third millennium bc – with unchallengeable certainty: 1. Ancient Sumerians buried their dead in the belief that they would be going on, or rather down, to the Netherworld,

The ‘dead-retainer’ procedure as exemplified at Ur was a surprise at its discovery and it still takes a bit of swallowing today. It seems, as one might say, a ‘funny thing for Sumerians to do’, for otherwise we do not encounter counter-intuitive, ‘primitive’ Sumerian phenomena, and this kind of sacrificial burial is rare in general. It is significant that in the great sweep of ancient Mesopotamian archaeology, no comparable retainer graves have been found prior to those, or after those, of the Ur cemetery.

We might well imagine that his followers would prefer to take drastic steps rather than continue without him, meaning that the burial scene described in the Sumerian text echoed historical reality. Perhaps the burial of conveniently dead or specially despatched retainers was already a deep-seated tradition among the kings of Uruk; but more likely, perhaps, it originated at the very demise of Gilgamesh himself.

What is especially interesting in this early Sumerian tradition is the idea that the eṭemmu, the dead person’s ghost, remains trapped in the body until released by formula and ritual. Crucial, then, is that suspended interval of time between the moment of death and the point when the dead person’s ghost is freed and despatched to the Netherworld.

Ghosts, of course, were not the prerogative of human beings royal or rich. In writing this book, the greatest reward has come in following the ghost lives of the humbler inhabitants of ancient Mesopotamia, as far as possible the normal townsfolk. For them, ghosts of the dead were part of life, and to set the scene we must consider the houses of the living as well as the graves of the departed, for the two are closely intertwined.

In the end, of course, every mortal had to be laid to rest. For the ancient Mesopotamian – as for all mortals – burial activity was hedged around with emotion, uncertainty and apprehension.

One-liner omens existed to cover not only building your tomb, but, as we will see in the following chapter, seeing your ghost.

Ghosts were just part of normal life in the Land-between-the-Rivers.

the Mesopotamian population did more than merely believe in them. Ghosts were taken entirely for granted as part of human life within the surrounding world.

At any given moment, therefore, an eṭemmu-ghost could appear to a Babylonian or Assyrian individual, busy about their daily lives, thinking about altogether different things. What lent an essential ‘normality’ to the matter was the understanding that those who came back from the Netherworld had their reason.

For the Mesopotamian in his ghost world, the crucial difference between ghost rights and cause of death is that something could be done only about the former.

Dying without a grave, accidentally or otherwise, was a terrible fate. It was a weapon in warfare and judgement, for no quietus was attainable.

We encounter here an example of the very human capacity to combine parallel beliefs, complementary or contradictory as they may be, whose function is shared and whose reality is supported by ritual, without apparent difficulty. Passages in cuneiform leave us in no doubt that sliding into interrupted or erratic offering service was a fatal mistake vis-à-vis the equanimity of the dead, to the point that they would likely make an appearance in the house, where, not meeting with satisfaction, they would become clamorous and troublesome.

Discomfort and trouble caused to Mesopotamians by ghosts took both external and internal forms.

Since this matter was so much part of daily life it is understandable that much activity was devoted to dealing with those Mesopotamian ghosts who decided to look in on those who remained ‘upstairs’.

The first biblical word for ghost is Rephaim (Hebrew rêpāʾîm), a plural noun translated ‘shades’ in the NRSV, recalling the same image for a ghost sometimes used in Babylonian, ṣillu.

Note, crucially, that the original Hebrew is ba‘alat ’ôb, literally ‘Ghost-Mistress’, while the conversation also implies that there was more than one Ghost-Mistress in the country. Saul thus reveals himself to be a dyed-in-the-wool subscriber to necromantic consultation, convinced of its validity and taking it entirely for granted. He also knew that whatever the official position, ghost and spirit operators were still in business, and his own servants knew immediately whom to see and where to go.

At the same time, its very name, Well of Generation, implies that the deep Babylonian belief (for which see Afterword) that the spirits of the dead remained in the Netherworld until, one at a time, they were required to give life to a new baby child, was shared also by the pre-Hebrew Canaanites.

A similar description appears in the Gospel of Matthew. Here, too, there is a good deal of worry by scholars and theologians about what the text, and Greek fantasma, really mean here, but it seems to me that the disciples who were present on that occasion just thought they had seen a ghost.

Starting at the beginning, Heaven is above, Earth is in the middle and the Netherworld beneath. With regard to death, burial and ghosts (and all that they could lead to), here we are mostly concerned with the Netherworld.

Being Below 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.

there was no post-mortem judgement of morals to be endured by a human spirit on arrival, let alone backward-looking punishment; the shadowy entrepõt was thus no waiting-room where the dead hung about waiting for good news (upwards) or bad (further downwards). They were already ‘down’. The importance and impact of this, even if it is a purely literary tradition, cannot be exaggerated.

If there is no courtroom drama waiting in the end, how are we to understand it all? It would be strange if the Netherworld construction simply existed as described, meaning an unending shadowy but goal-less sojourn in the company of an ever-swelling multitude of drifting spectres. The purpose of it all, by and large, is not considered by writers on the Mesopotamian scene either, but once posed it compels an answer.