The oldest ghost depiction uncovered at the British Museum
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Nov 15, 2024
Dr. Irving Finkel shares insights on the oldest known depiction of a ghost, found on an ancient cuneiform tablet at the British Museum, revealing Mesopotamian beliefs and practices around spirits.
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My name is Dr Irving Finkel and I'm a senior curator in
the British Museum in the Department of the Middle East
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And among the cuneiform tablets, which are something
like 130,000 pieces altogether made of clay
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one of them has on it the oldest picture of a ghost
as far as we know ever recovered from archaeology
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Well, this is the cuneiform tablet
in question and it's made of clay
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which was the natural writing material used by the
Sumerians and the Babylonians in ancient Mesopotamia
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for more than 3,000 years long before paper was invented
or anything with which the modern world is familiar
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And they used this to take messages which were pressed
into the surface of the clay with a special writing stick
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And this is among them the jewel in the crown because it has on it the
oldest depiction of a ghost which has been recovered through archaeology
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Well, this piece of clay is a direct window into what these ancient people
all that time ago in ancient Iraq thought and believed about ghosts
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They were just part of life. And
when people died, they were buried
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And if everything went well, they went down
to the underworld and they stayed there
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And that is the default position. But sometimes it happened for more
than one reason that a ghost who was supposed to be down there came back
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And the Babylonian view of it was that when a ghost comes
back and there were lots and lots of different reasons
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what they were dealing with is a ghost who was unhappy. If you had a ghost and it wouldn go away and the obvious things that you
did didn get rid of it then you have to get professional help And there were exorcists and diviners people in the Babylonian culture
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for whom this was their daily work. And part of
it was this, if someone had a troublesome ghost
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they would go and consult one of these authorities. Now,
very commonly the idea was, if you knew who the ghost was
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if you pinned it down, what
you would do is to make
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a little model out of clay of the person,
give them some identifying figures
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and then they would be subjected to a magical spell and perhaps
buried somewhere where they would go back to the underworld
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in a way that they'd been appeased and that
their source of distress had been finished
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and the sacrifices they're supposed to get of food
and water were still regularly going to be given
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This tablet is something else because the
man who wrote it in about the 4th century BC
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300 and something in Babylon, who was one of these
professional exorcists, not only did he write
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down the description of the figurine and the
spell that you were supposed to recite and what
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you were supposed to do with it, but he actually
made in the surface of the clay with a very fine
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point drawings, drawings of two figures that
had to be made by some young exorcist who would
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be using this as a reference work in the
future. So what we have here is a unique picture
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because the practice of figurine making is well
known and in fact it's not a Babylonian thing
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exclusively. There are many cultures who do
that kind of thing but to make a proper drawing
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is quite extraordinary
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