Ancient Mesopotamian literature, written in cuneiform from around 3000 BC, is haunted by omens and ghosts. Most of the sources on ghosts come from the 1st millennium BC, written in Akkadian, but some texts and ideas hark back to even older texts written in Sumerian.
Irving Finkel was first drawn to the subject, decades ago, while writing his doctoral thesis on Babylonian exorcistic magic, including cuneiform spells for driving ghosts away. He subsequently moved to the British Museum, and is now among the world’s authorities on cuneiform, known for his entertaining style of presentation to the general public, and for his fascination with the Flood, Noah’s Ark, and board games. Sometimes, Finkel admits, he has crouched silently in the darkness of evening at the top level of the museum’s Victorian Arched Room library, ‘like a wildlife photographer at a waterhole’, hopefully awaiting a spectral figure who is said to have been observed there more than once. ‘For me, though, no shady visitor.’ So there could hardly be a better guide to this esoteric subject – witness his latest study: The First Ghosts. Deeply scholarly but mostly accessible to the patient general reader, the book is conceived ‘to seek out’, with the help of archaeology and especially the most ancient writing, ‘the very first ghosts within our reach.’
Finkel argues that ghosts probably arrived among humans by the Upper Palaeolithic period, perhaps as early as 50,000 BC, and that they arise from the habit of ‘burial with bits’. This custom implies the existence of three beliefs. First, something survives of a human being beyond his or her death. Second, ‘something escapes the grasp of the corpse and goes somewhere’. Third, this something can reasonably be expected to be able to reappear.
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