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

by Irving Finkel

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.