At the
back of the British Museum is a cavernous room lined with hundreds of cased
wooden drawers supported by a central architrave. Each drawer contains tens of
glass-topped boxes of various sizes with neat, typewritten labels. The boxes
contain clay tablets from ancient Mesopotamia, around 130,000 of them, inscribed
in cuneiform, many broken and eroded. An agricultural boom at the end of the
fourth millennium bce led the Sumerians to create the first written records, in
order to help them keep track of various commodities. These early signs, traced
in wet clay with the sharpened end of a reed stylus, looked a lot like the
things they represented: a bowl for food or rations, a jug for beer and so on.
Over time, the scribes realised that it was quicker to impress than to incise
signs into clay, and the resulting script, cuneiform, gets its English name
from the characteristic wedges (cuneus in Latin).
The
earliest written recipes, laundry receipts, peace treaties, poetry,
representations of pi and lullabies are inscribed in cuneiform. Six thousand
years ago, people living in present-day Iraq washed their clothes and did maths
and shared songs and baked bread. They also saw ghosts. In his new book, The
First Ghosts, Irving Finkel, the curator in charge of the BM’s clay tablets
(and the reason I dropped law to study cuneiform), discusses what these and
other artefacts excavated from Mesopotamia tell us about supernatural
apparitions and the ways they populated everyday life. The clay tablets, he
writes, preserve ‘abundant and surprising details’ in the form of omens, spells,
myths, royal propaganda and letters, ‘almost as if they anticipated our
interest’.
Burial
sites from across the ancient world attest to what Finkel describes as ‘the
deep-seated conception that some part of a person does not vanish for ever’.
The first recorded use of a word to describe a spirit that is separate from,
and survives, the human body is a tablet dated to the early third millennium
bce, which is inscribed with the cuneiform character for the Sumerian word for
‘ghost’, gidim (although it originated as the script for Sumerian, cuneiform
was adapted for a number of other ancient languages, including Akkadian and
Hittite). Inhabitants of Mesopotamia were usually interred after death. The
Royal Cemetery at Ur, uncovered during excavations in the 1920s, housed sixteen
royal tombs that date from roughly the same period as the gidim tablet. The
aristocracy of Ur entered the afterlife with crowns, chariots, helmets, harps
and daggers. Some of them left this world with an entourage: archaeologists
discovered what they described as a ‘great death pit’ adjacent to one tomb,
containing the remains of 74 people, including adolescents. One skull from the
pit that underwent a CT scan was identified as that of a woman in her late
teens or early twenties: the last thing she felt would have been the blunt
force of something like a battle-axe.
Not
every Mesopotamian was buried in such style. Graves have also been discovered
beneath and within the walls of family homes, allowing the deceased to be fed
and watered by their surviving relatives (ideally by the eldest son), who were
also required to recite their names regularly. Sometimes people buried their
relatives in coffins shaped like bronze bathtubs, or in large jars. Others
wrapped the corpse in reed matting or covered it with broken pieces of pottery
before burying it in a pit. Even unborn babies, some barely beyond twenty weeks
of gestation, were given a final resting place. Finkel cites a Sumerian poem
about Gilgamesh: ‘Did you see my little stillborn children who never knew
existence?’ Gilgamesh asks the ghost of his companion, Enkidu. ‘I saw them,’
Enkidu replies. ‘They play at a table of gold and silver, laden with honey and
ghee.’
Those
who went unhappily to their graves or who remained unburied, as well as those
whose tombs were untended (or insufficiently tended), became restless ghosts.
The spirits that rose from the dead were as varied as their living
counterparts: there were ghosts of the very young, of women who died in
childbirth and those who died as virgins, of wet nurses, soldiers, slaves.
Sometimes they were described according to the way they met their end – by
drowning in a river, burning to death, falling off a roof or being slain in
war. They retained the characters of the people they had once been, from
mild-mannered to malicious. Like more recent depictions of ghosts, the
Mesopotamian accounts make clear just how unpleasant these spirits could be. A
99-line spell, which belongs to a much larger work on expelling demons,
describes ‘exactly what it was like to be visited by an unknown, unidentified
ghost of the roaming, malicious hooligan type’. These ghosts ‘flicker like
flame’ and ‘flash like lightning’, they cross the thresholds of houses and
descend over the rooftops. They frighten, snarl at and otherwise torment the
‘sick person’. They hide in a house’s holes and crevices, they slither, they
stalk people, they roam the streets and steppe.
The
spirits of the restless dead also caused medical havoc. They formed part of a
complex explanatory system for illness, which included deities, demons and even
witchcraft alongside causes we would still recognise – a snake bite or the
sun’s heat. Some ghosts entered the body through the ear. The word for ‘ghost’
could be written in several ways that exploited the many meanings layered onto
each cuneiform sign. As Finkel writes, one sign combined the signs for ‘open’
and ‘ear’, giving a literal reading of ‘ear-opener’. Ghosts, therefore, could
cause roaring or ringing ears as well as all manner of medical misery, from
madness and headaches to flatulence, fever, chills and depression. Some
cuneiform texts that describe ghost-induced illness detail the way the now
ghost died, and sometimes the manner of death corresponds to the symptoms the
ghost causes: the ghost of a person who drowned, for example, caused shortness
of breath in the haunted person, ‘like one who has just come up from the
water’.
A rich
tradition of ghostbusting emerged in response to the many troubles caused by
ghosts in ancient Mesopotamia. Those who could afford it turned to scholars
known as the ashipu, whose accepted English translation of ‘exorcist’ doesn’t
quite capture their professional domain. Usually men (though there are sporadic
references to women exorcists, for instance in the Maqlû series of incantations
against witchcraft), these scholars spent years mastering medical knowledge and
treatment, including what we might call ‘magical’ remedies. Medicine in Ancient
Assur by the Assyriologist Troels Pank Arbøll follows the career of one such
exorcist, Kisir-Ashur.* By piecing together more than seventy texts found in a
private library in the city of Ashur, Arbøll has mapped out Kisir-Ashur’s
training, which included anatomy, diagnostics, paediatrics, veterinary medicine
and magic. As a trainee, with the help of his father, he learned practical
skills that ranged from the use of bandages and emetics to spells and rituals.
In one instruction manual, written in the summer of 658 bce, Kisir-Ashur
describes how to treat a patient suffering from ghost-induced confusion. After
sweeping the ground and sprinkling it with purified water, setting up an
incense burner and pouring a libation of beer, the exorcist must make a
figurine of the confusion-causing ghost from clay, tallow and wax, which the patient
then holds up to the sun god while reciting a long incantation.
The
medical and magical instruments at the exorcists’ disposal were as varied as
their patients’ ailments. Someone troubled by visions of dead people might be
told to wear a leather pouch filled with various plants and a soiled rag, or
other noxious substances such as sulphur or fish oil (these were also useful in
repelling unwanted living visitors). Another ritual calls for three libations
of donkey urine; Finkel explains that ‘the thirsty ghost – for ghosts were
always thirsty – might take it for a refreshing beer and receive a punitive
shock.’ Spells exploit connections not immediately obvious to a modern reader:
some of them have abracadabra-like strings of words and syllables whose
original meaning might well have been forgotten but whose magical applications
remained powerful. Some of these spells involve necromancy, to which Finkel
devotes a chapter.
Some
ghosts formed an intense connection with their victims, requiring the exorcist
to create a substitute companion. Around ten lines of cuneiform survive on one
side of a broken clay tablet from the fourth century bce. They were written by
a Babylonian scribe called Marduk-apla-iddin as part of a manual describing how
to get rid of a ghost so persistent it resisted other methods of exorcism. The
reverse of the tablet appears to be blank, but under the right light the
outlines of two figures appear. It is incredibly rare to find drawings on
tablets from ancient Mesopotamia: only a handful have been discovered so far.
In this image, a man with a long beard holds his shackled hands in front of
him, attached to a rope. On the right, a woman in a smock holds the other end
of the rope. The instructions tell us that she has been created as a companion
to entice the obstinate ghost into the underworld. Finkel reckons that the
figure on the left is ‘the oldest drawing of a ghost in the history of the
world’.
Students
of Akkadian today often read a Babylonian narrative about the journey of Ishtar,
goddess of love and war, through seven gates into the ‘Land-of-No-Return’.
Ishtar’s descent into that ‘gloomy house’, whose inhabitants live in darkness,
eat dust and clay, and wear feathers for clothes, gives us a glimpse of the
horrors imagined by Mesopotamians for the afterlife. Another underworld account
comes from a nightmare reported by an Assyrian prince called Kummaya, and
relates how he was held captive in the ‘House of Death’, which was populated
with ‘top-rank underworld gods and demons’. Here he met seventeen embodiments
of evil in the form of hybrid demons and ghosts, and a personification of Death
with the head of a dragon. It’s not surprising that the bearded Babylonian
ghost didn’t want to make the one-way journey through the seven gates.
Conceptions
of the afterlife were not uniformly bleak. Ancient Mesopotamians were buried
with bowls, saucers, bottles, bracelets, beads and even toys. Wherever they
were going, the dead, it seemed, could still eat and drink and dress and play.
But many of them hung around the living. I imagine ghosts in much the same way
the Mesopotamians did. They should look and act like the people they once were,
but they represent something beyond the restlessness of the dead, giving shape
to what is lost, difficult or unresolved.
Review :
The First Ghosts: Most Ancient of Legacies by Irving Finkel.
Hodder,
344 pp., £25, November 2021, 978 1 5293 0326 1
Roaming,
Malicious, Hooligan Ghosts. By Moudhy Al-Rashid. London Review of Books,
January 2022,
Irving
Finkel speaks to Ellie Cawthorne about his new book, which transports us to
ancient Mesopotamia to uncover the earliest written evidence of a belief in
ghosts.
Ellie
Cawthorne: You argue that “most, possibly even all, human beings everywhere
truly believe in ghosts”. Why do you think humans are inclined to believe that
the dead might return to exist among us?
Irving
Finkel: In the modern world, ghosts have a funny status. Most people don’t wear
their ghosts on their sleeves, because there’s a good chance they’d be branded
idiots for believing in such things. But when you look into the matter
historically, we have plenty of testimonies concerning ghosts, coming from all
over the world and covering a huge span of time. They date right back to the
very first written material that we have – cuneiform tablets from ancient
Mesopotamia, in what is now Iraq, developed before 3000 BC. And this earliest
written evidence is what I focus on in my book.
Arguably,
you can trace this ghost business back even farther than the beginning of
writing. I would posit that the concept of something hanging around after death
goes back to the very dawn of mankind. Take as an example a Neanderthal burial
in which the body is laid out in a prepared grave, in a particular position,
alongside special bits and pieces. The point here is this: if you bury somebody
in the ground to get rid of them because they’re smelly and dangerous, that’s
one thing. But burying them in a special way with goods implies that your
expectation is that, once the horrible bodily chemicals have disappeared,
something – most likely the essence of the person – comes out of the body and
goes on to some kind of afterlife. And my idea is this: if you’re willing to
accept that someone’s spirit can disappear over there, it’s a short step to
believing that it can come back again.
I think
we’re hardwired to believe in ghosts. The most austere, clever scientist in two
white coats might look at you as if you’re crazy – but if you make them jump,
they will shiver just like everybody else. It’s beneath the skin.
AC : Your
book focuses on the very first writings on ghosts, on ancient Mesopotamian
cuneiform tablets. Why are they so illuminating to study?
IF : One
of the reasons I wrote this book is that there is a general feeling that ghosts
were invented in the 19th century, or perhaps in the Middle Ages. Not many
writers even talk about the marvellous stuff on ghosts from Greece and Rome,
let alone Mesopotamia [which included Babylonian, Sumerian and Assyrian
cultures]. So I thought that I would put the Mesopotamians back on the ghost
map to show that these beliefs are truly old and unchanging.
If you
learn to read Babylonian – it’ll only take you 20 years – and you translate
these messages written on cuneiform tablets, you’ll find it extraordinary just
how familiar the world of ghosts that emerges from them is. The underlying
story is still fairly recognisable to us today: if a ghost is unhappy in the
underworld – perhaps if they had a miserable death, or didn’t get the offerings
they were due – they could come back. And they could make living people jump or
pull their hair, follow them around or make them ill – all kinds of things.
AC : You
state that ghosts were “not symbols or metaphors, but literal realities” in
Mesopotamia. How so?
IF :
From the
king on the throne to the beggar in the street, the whole population didn’t
just believe in ghosts – they took them for granted as a fact of life. Ghosts
were just part of the everyday scenario, alongside all the other things you had
to worry about, like children, housing, warfare and disease.
And
since ghosts were an everyday reality, they also called for the undertaking of
everyday chores. A household’s oldest son was responsible for making offerings
of food and drink to his dead family, who were often buried under the courtyard
of the family home. They needed water and food because there was an
understanding that the underworld wasn’t very hospitable. Arriving there was a
bit like arriving at an Airbnb with no towels or electricity. People had a
responsibility to look after the ghosts of their relatives in the sense of
reciting prayers in their honour, remembering them, talking about them.
The
explanations provided for ghosts returning were not metaphorical but literal –
there’s a big difference. The Mesopotamians didn’t speak about them in elusive
poetics but as something grounded in reality. In many parts of the world, this
attitude survives unchanged. In villages in India, you can ask people about
local ghosts and they’ll have 100 stories to share immediately.
AC : How
did belief in ghosts connect to the wider religious system in ancient
Mesopotamia?
IF : When
we talk about deities in the ancient world, “religion” isn’t necessarily the
best word for the system. The Mesopotamians didn’t have a word for “religion”,
because their system of gods and goddesses was more than that – it was
all-pervading. They had a huge pantheon of deities, and in some ways
interactions with ghosts did trade on this system. If someone returned from the
dead, a priest or exorcist would be recruited to drive the ghost back. These priests
would call on the power of the gods, invoking names such as Ishtar the Goddess
of Love to help them to deal with ghosts. On the whole, though, dealing with
the dead was slightly unrelated to the prevailing main religion. It wasn’t
centrally what we would call a religious matter but more of a traditional
matter.
AC : Were
ghosts always figures to be frightened of?
IF : Another
jolly good question, because in the later tradition we think of ghosts mainly
as clanking ghouls in hotel rooms, bearing frightening messages. In Mesopotamia,
people could be startled and sometimes made unhappy by ghosts; if you saw a
ghost, on the whole it wasn’t good news – it generally meant that there was a
danger that you needed to do something about.
However,
because people tended to live in extended families, with their relatives and
ancestors buried directly under the family home, so quite often you were
dealing with a familial ghost. And I feel that the basic position towards a
ghost from your own stock was a kind of sympathy. Of course, if that sympathy
didn’t work, you could always pay an exorcist to get rid of them with more
heavy-duty tools.
In
addition, there were also lots of unknown ghosts floating about who were
nothing to do with your family, and who might be very dangerous indeed. They
could go into your ear, torment you and make you very ill. Imagine that after a
battle, for example, there’d be thousands of dead soldiers who hadn’t been
buried properly, floating about. And the first thing they might do is head to
Babylon and make life hell for anybody still living there.
AC : Can
you give some examples of the types of ghost spells found on cuneiform tablets?
IF : Babylonian
scribes described a whole slew of simple spells and complicated rituals to get
rid of ghosts. Some of these rely on lists of all of the different kinds of
ghosts – a ghost who died in a fire, say, or a ghost who was run over by a
chariot or drowned in a well or died in childbirth. Part of the spell to get
rid of them would involve reading out this list, essentially saying: “Whether
you are this type of ghost, or that type of ghost, we know who you are. Go back
where you belong!” Identification of a troublesome ghost was a means of gaining
power over it.
Another
tablet contains a list detailing what it meant if you saw a ghost. For example,
if you saw a ghost in the bedroom, it could mean that your uncle was going to
die, or you were about to lose all your money. Those are grim portents, but
there were specialists who could use concomitant forms of magic to dispel the
threat. And an omen wasn’t a fixed fate but more like something in the air.
One of
my favourite spells is designed to help someone who keeps seeing a ghost. They
have to recite a spell that essentially says: “You, who keep persecuting me,
leave me alone – I’m not going to Kutha.” That was a city in Babylonia, the
location of the entrance to the underworld. It had a big temple through which
gods and ghosts came up. You can imagine ghosts beckoning with a bony finger,
saying to a living person: “Come with us.” The person who has been seeing a
ghost then calls on all these goddesses to back them up. It’s fantastic,
because it demonstrates that, though the gods are very busy, they will come
over and thwack a ghost if needed. It’s basically a way of telling the ghost: “Piss
off back to your underworld gloom!”
AC : What
can you tell us about the underworld?
IF : One
of the main sources of information on this is a marvellous series of literary
texts describing the descent of the beautiful goddess Inanna into the
underworld. On a quest to rescue her lover, who is imprisoned there, she passes
through seven gates, each manned by ferocious gatekeepers. Inanna journeys all
the way down to the underworld, where her sister is queen, in order to sort out
this problem. When she gets there, it’s very gloomy indeed – there’s no real
light. All of the ghosts are lurking, their numbers increasing every minute as
more people die. We’re told in the Akkadian Gilgamesh Epic that “dust is their
sustenance, clay their food. They see no light, dwelling in darkness. They are
clad like birds, with wings as garments.” One gets the impression of them all
swaying with their shoulders together like dusty penguins. The lack of food and
drink explains the evolution of a ritual of pouring out drinks and offering
food for the dead – it theoretically went down to sustain them in the
underworld.
This
wasn’t hell in the sense of a burning pit with pitchforks and laughing devils
pulling your nose. It was more a kind of interregnum – a kind of dreadful
waiting place in which nobody’s quite certain what they’re waiting for.
Understanding this adds a whole different dimension to the idea that ghosts
want to return. If you were trapped down there, wouldn’t you want to go back to
the sunny world of ancient Iraq?
Another
crucial point to understand is that the Mesopotamian afterlife didn’t have a
moral dimension: there was no concept that bad behaviour in this life meant a
terrible time to come in the next. In my opinion, that connection was a
disastrous invention because it dislocated responsibility – everybody spent the
whole of their lives fretting about the consequences of their actions after
death. The Mesopotamians didn’t have that trouble.
AC : You’ve
found spells for necromancy. How – and why – would anyone bring people back
from the dead?
IF : Necromancy
wasn’t about bringing people permanently back to life so much as summoning them
temporarily to get some answers.
The
Mesopotamians believed, as many people do today, that ghosts were in possession
of a knowledge of the future. It was understood that if a ghost appeared and
didn’t say anything, they wanted to communicate something. So there were spells
to try to encourage a ghost to answer questions. Sometimes this would require a
full-blown ritual in which you procured the skull of the person you wanted to
interrogate – who might well be a family member, retrieved from under the
floor. The skull was plonked on the table and covered in oil, while the
exorcist burnt incense and called upon the Sun God to bring the person back up
from the underworld. They would then enter the skull, and you could ask it
questions. This ritual was probably terribly frightening, so I don’t think you
would do it in a flippant way. However cool and callous a person you might be,
I think that staring at a skull until it began to speak would make you pretty
jumpy.
After
the ritual was over, and you’d hopefully got the answers you were after, you’d
want to send the ghost back to the underworld jolly quickly. A safety clause
was built in to the necromancy manual to help with this: underneath the spell
to bring back a ghost, the scribe provided a whole load of spells to then get
rid of them as soon as possible. The last thing you would want would be to
bring up a ghost for a chat and then let them go off round the world causing
mischief.
AC : In
the book you discuss how disrespecting the dead could be a political device.
Can you give us an example of that?
IF : It’s
very interesting to see what you might call political ghost-work at play. Take,
for example, the Assyrian king Ashurbanipal, one of the great rulers of
antiquity. He had ongoing military trouble with the Elamites, in what is now Iran.
In a particularly regrettable state of military fury, his troops ravaged the
tombs of the old Elamite kings and scattered their bones, thereby condemning
the dead rulers of Ashurbanipal’s hated enemy to a state of eternal unrest.
That intention – to impose eternal unrest on the Elamites – is expressly stated
in the official Assyrian annals. This was not a metaphor or a clever use of
language – it was jolly well what happened.
AC : As
well as ghosts, the Mesopotamians also believed in demons. What can you tell us
about them?
IF : The
big difference between a demon and a ghost was that, whereas a ghost was a dead
human being, a demon had an alien component. Demons were immortal: you could
not kill one. If you were lucky, a ghost was not generally malevolent and
wicked, more likely just miserable. I don’t think you’d find a miserable demon.
Demons had no heart – they were horribly evil.
Most
demons were either a bit dragony or anthropomorphic – basically like human
beings with other nasty characteristics thrown in. One of the worst of all was
the demoness Lamashtu, the “baby snatcher”, who liked consuming newborns. At
first sight she looked like a woman, but get closer and she had wings, talons
and reptilian feet – a very frightening mixture.
AC : What
can looking at these ancient Mesopotamian beliefs tell us about humanity’s
relationship with the idea of death more generally?
IF : Ghosts
are a persistent reality in human thinking, and it’s always interesting to try
to uncover when such long-running ideas started. I would argue that ghost
beliefs are very difficult to expunge from our mindset because they’ve been
there since the beginning, built into the human psyche. The idea of not being
able to rest in peace if your life is lacking in resolution, or you met an
unhappy or awkward end, is to be found absolutely all over the world.
One of
the most exciting things about working on these texts was the empathy I felt
with the Mesopotamians, for whom ghosts were a problem. I thought that the only
way to write about this was with empathy – in other words, there was no point
debating whether or not ghosts really existed, because for the Mesopotamians
that was not a question worth asking. Instead I focused on looking at what
Mesopotamians did because ghosts existed. That doesn’t mean to say that I
believe in ghosts personally; it’s more of a way of finding a voice that you
can recognise in these texts. And the voice that is distilled from these
sources is still, I think, very vibrant.
Irving
Finkel is curator of ancient Mesopotamian script, languages and cultures at the
British Museum. His research specialities include the study of cuneiform script
and the history of board games, and among his previous books is The Ark Before
Noah: Decoding the Story of the Flood (Hodder & Stoughton, 2014)
“Ghosts
were taken for granted as part of everyday Mesopotamian life”: Irving Finkel on
ancient Mesopotamia and ghosts. By Ellie Cawthorne. Hstory Extra, October 29, 2021
A
3,500-year-old Babylonian tablet that had been kept in the vaults of London’s
British Museum since the 19th-century appears to include the earliest depiction
of a ghost, according to a forthcoming book.
The
discovery is featured in The First Ghosts: Most Ancient of Legacies, authored
by Irving Finkel, a curator of the British Museum’s Middle Eastern department.
According to Finkel, the long-overlooked clay tablet features an obscured
drawing that can only be seen from above, under bright light.
“You’d
probably never give it a second thought because the area where the drawings are
looks like it’s got no writing,” he told the Guardian in an interview. “But
when you examine it and hold it under a lamp, those figures leap out at you
across time in the most startling way.”
The
drawing on the tablet depicts a bearded male ghost being led to the underworld
by a younger woman, possibly a lover. It belongs to a cuneiform guide to
exorcising, which has never been publicly displayed, and half of which is
missing.
“It’s
obviously a male ghost and he’s miserable,” Finkel said. “You can imagine a
tall, thin, bearded ghost hanging about the house did get on people’s nerves.
The final analysis was that what this ghost needed was a lover.”
“You
can’t help but imagine what happened before. ‘Oh God, Uncle Henry’s back.’
Maybe Uncle Henry’s lost three wives,” Fickel quipped. “Something that
everybody knew was that the way to get rid of the old bugger was to marry him
off. It’s not fanciful to read this into it. It’s a kind of explicit message.
There’s very high-quality writing there and immaculate draughtsmanship.”
The back
of the hand-size tablet features a text with instructions for handling a ghost
that “seizes hold of a person and pursues him and cannot be loosed.”
The
exorcism ritual begins with making figurines of a man and a woman, with
specific instructions in the text: “You dress the man in an everyday shift and
equip him with travel provisions. You wrap the woman in four red garments and
clothe her in a purple cloth. You give her a golden brooch. You equip her fully
with bed, chair, mat and towel; you give her a comb and a flask.”
Next,
the ritual involves vessels of beer and evoking Shamash, the Mesopotamian god
of the sun and the judge of the underworld.
“At
sunrise towards the sun you make the ritual arrangements and set up two
carnelian vessels of beer,” the cuneiform reads. “You set in place a special
vessel and set up a juniper censer with juniper. You draw the curtain like that
of the diviner. You [put] the figurines together with their equipment and place
them in position… and say as follows, Shamash [god of the sun and judge of the
underworld by night].”
The text
ends with the ominous warning: “Do not look behind you!”
According
to Finkel, the purpose of the ritual was to transfer the ghost into one of the
figurines. He believes the tablet belonged to a library of magic in the house
of an exorcist or in a temple.
In a
2018 video by the British Museum, the scholar explained that Mesopotamian
burial rituals made sure that the dead are “jolly well locked in and wouldn’t come
back and cause trouble.”
“Everybody
in Mesopotamia, as far as I understand it, believed in ghosts,” he added,
explaining that people of the period felt sympathy towards wandering spirits
that weren’t able to find rest.
When
asked if he would like to attend a séance himself, Finkel concurred without
hesitation, saying: “I would like to see a ghost. I’ve never seen one. It’s
very annoying to me.”
Curator
Discovers What May Be the World’s Earliest Depiction of a Ghost. By Hakim
Bishara. Hyperallergic, October 25, 2021.
The First
Ghost Stories | Dr. Irving Finkel - Live Events.
Learn
how the near-universal belief in ghosts goes back to the beginning of
time. Discover how the oldest known
writing, in cuneiform script on tablets of clay, gives us a full picture of the
ancient Mesopotamian ghost experience: who might be expected to be a
ghost, how to keep the dead happy in the
netherworld, how to banish annoying ghosts that keep appearing and how to
summon the dead to come back and disclose the future.
Archaeology Now November 6, 2020.
In the late
evening, after the last members of the public have been ushered out of the
building and the outer gates have been bolted shut, a swift and palpable change
comes over the British Museum.
The museum is
the most popular tourist attraction in Britain, ahead of Tate Modern and the
National Gallery: more than 6.2m people visited in 2019, over 17,000 every day.
Without these visitors, the relentless thrum of activity beneath the
glass-and-steel lattice roof of the Great Court fades to a whisper. A thick
silence fills the cavernous galleries that surround it, each one loaded with
artefacts that encompass the arc of human history.
By the time
the night shift begins, most of the lights in the museum have been
extinguished. The security staff, who patrol the length and breadth of the
14-acre complex until early morning, carry out many of their duties by
torchlight. Scouring the premises for anomalies – water leaks, the smell of
gas, an employee trapped in a remote corridor – they cast their beams into dark
corners, the shadows melting back to reveal a war-like Roman bust or an Aztec
mask with shining eyes and teeth. They may even confront a real human being,
like the body of an Ancient Egyptian, 5,500 years dead, huddled inside a
reconstruction of his sandy grave.
Even without
visitors, the museum is never completely silent. The main building, which dates
back to the 1820s and has been expanded and reconfigured ever since, is alive
with creaks, as old buildings are prone to be. The air-conditioning hums. Doors
clank. Sudden breezes whistle around corners and up lift shafts. As security
guards move through the 94 rooms open to the public, along the rabbit warren of
back-of-house offices and passageways, and into the rambling network of storage
facilities below ground, they are privy to the building’s most intimate sounds:
scrapes and groans, drowned out during opening hours, can grow disconcertingly
loud at night.
The guards are
accustomed to such disturbances. But every so often a patrol encounters a
noise, a flash of movement, or simply a sudden lurch in the pit of the stomach,
that stops even hardened veterans in their tracks.
Sometimes it’s
the doors. To complete a full circuit of the museum more than 3,000 doors need
to be opened and closed. Some of these, particularly ones that seal off the
major galleries, are cumbersome to shut. But when bolted, they won’t open again
without a tussle. Except when they do. Take the Sutton Hoo gallery, which
houses treasures from an Anglo-Saxon ship, among them a ferocious-looking
helmet believed to have been worn by Raedwald, king of the East Angles, in the
seventh century. On one occasion a guard bolted the double doors and moved on
to the next room, only to be informed by a CCTV operator that the doors stood
wide open again. Video footage of the gallery showed them moving spontaneously.
Sometimes it’s
a sudden drop in temperature, like the unnerving patches of cold air that
linger next to the winged, human-headed bull of Nimrud at the entrance to the
Assyrian galleries. Sometimes it’s the sound of footsteps, or music, or crying,
where no obvious source can be found.
And sometimes it
might be the objects themselves. One night a security guard was passing through
the African galleries in the basement and paused for a moment before the figure
of a two-headed dog. The guard believed that this 19th-century wooden Congolese
fetish, bristling with rough iron nails, possessed some mysterious power. On
this particular night he felt an irresistible compulsion to point his finger at
it. As he did so, the fire alarms in the gallery went off. A few days later the
guard returned to the gallery with his brother, who also pointed at the
two-headed dog. Again the alarms sounded.
These stories
were all told, directly or indirectly, to Noah Angell, an American artist and
storyteller who has been researching hauntings at the British Museum since
2016. There are many other tales too – of spectral figures cropping up in
visitors’ photographs, of a séance held by departmental staff in a haunted
brick store.
Angell first
learned of the stories in a London pub. He was at birthday drinks for a friend
who had once worked at the museum, when her former colleagues started trading
eerie anecdotes from their old workplace. Angell, a 39-year-old from North
Carolina, often makes use of folklore and oral history in his writing and
artistic projects. He sensed an opportunity to get under the skin of one of
Britain’s grandest institutions. “I thought that there would be a half dozen or
so stories which everyone knows, and they circulate around the museum, and
little variations and mutations are created,” he told me. He assumed that
documenting them would be straightforward. Four years on the tales are still
pouring in: more than 50 visitors and staff have spoken to him so far, and
there’s no sign of the supply running dry.
These days
Angell gives unofficial walking tours of the museum, spending two hours
retelling the stories in their exact locations (the coronavirus outbreak has
put a stop to these for the moment). Compactly built, with dark-brown hair, a
high forehead and the stubbly remnants of a once-mighty beard, Angell steers
clear of the arch theatrics of a typical ghost-tour host. He begins by warning
that anyone who mocks the museum’s spirits risks getting hurt. On the first
stop, in the Clocks and Watches gallery, he recounts how a Dutch couple took a
photograph of the mechanical galleon, a model ship of gilded copper and iron
from 16th-century Germany, only to find, reflected in the glass case, the
apparition of a female dwarf with missing clumps of hair smiling back at them.
A woman on the information desk who dealt with the couple’s bewildered query
ended up directing them to the Spiritualist Association of Great Britain. She
noted that the ghost was dressed in 16th-century costume.
Angell is
alert to how British Museum staff experience the building differently according
to their place in the hierarchy. He notes that it’s often the lower-level
workers, not curators or senior management, who have stories. (A former museum
worker himself, Angell says that one of his goals for the project is to give a
voice to gallery attendants, cleaners and other overlooked staff, who have
built up intimate knowledge of the collection through years of observation and
proximity.)
It was the
orbs that drew in the overnight security team. Around 3am an alarm went off in
a disabled toilet and a pair of guards rushed over to check what was going on.
Nothing seemed amiss until a guard received a call from a CCTV operator, who
said that large balls of white light were hovering above a staircase in the
Great Court and chasing each other through the air. “We can’t see anything,”
the security guard responded. “They’re all around you,” the CCTV operator
replied.
The appearance
of the orbs coincided with an exhibition called “Germany: Memories of a
Nation”, which ran from October 2014 to January 2015. The guard who stood among
the balls of light wondered if they might be connected to one of the exhibits:
a white, wrought-iron gate from the concentration camp at Buchenwald that bore
the motto “Jedem das Seine” (“To each what he deserves”). “You get objects that
hold energy,” the guard explained. “Nothing [else] in that exhibition was
anything that will have caused something like that...I’m really not surprised
if someone attached to that object was to come with it. You couldn’t blame
them, to be quite honest. I’m happy to have them here.” The orbs appeared at
the same time each night until the exhibition ended. “When Germany went,” the
security guard said, “they went.”
Angell says
many museum staff share this attitude. “Most of the people that I’ve gathered
these stories from...don’t self-identify as believing in ghosts,” he tells me.
“For the most part, these visitor-services and security people are
working-class blokes and they don’t make a fuss unless something really serious
is going on...But what they all seem to agree on, as the sort of folk belief of
the museum worker, is that objects hold energy. This is a formulation that
everyone is comfortable with.”
Angell, who is
planning to publish a book on the subject, is not immediately forthcoming about
what he believes himself. On the tour he lets his audience make up their own
minds. “This project is agnostic,” he tells me at one point, adding
mischievously: “I may not be agnostic, but that’s neither here nor there.”
As we talk it
becomes clearer that he is open to supernatural explanations and considers
himself to be, as he puts it, “somewhat psychic”. He’s happy to let a few
provocative ideas slip out in conversation. One of these puts a distinctive
spin on the debate around restitution, which has been growing in volume in
recent years.
In 2017
France’s president, Emmanuel Macron, declared the return of African heritage to
Africa a “top priority” (though by the end of 2019 only one object had been
returned). A report published the following year, commissioned by him,
recommended that all objects obtained during the colonial era be restored to
their country of origin unless there was proof they had been acquired
legitimately. Stéphane Martin, president of the Musée de Quai Branly, an anthropological
museum in Paris, decried the report in an interview with Le Monde as an act of
“self-flagellation”. But the French inquiry stirred the waters. The British
Museum has since received multiple requests, from Ethiopia, Nigeria and Chile
among others, to hand back disputed items.
The question
of restitution is as old as conquest and plunder. According to Pliny the Elder,
the Roman emperor Augustus was embarrassed enough to return pieces of looted
art to Greece. Discussion has intensified in recent years as the West has been
forced to confront the legacy of colonialism. Many former colonies have
asserted their claim to treasures, and indigenous communities have amplified
their demands through social media. Nigeria is planning a new museum to house
the Benin bronzes, the largest number of which are held at the British Museum.
Some
institutions in Britain have returned objects. The Manchester Museum said last
year it would send back 43 items to four of Australia’s First Nations. The
British Museum, by contrast, has avoided making any commitments. It loans items
around the world, but the museum cites a variety of reasons – including
government legislation blocking the removal of objects – for keeping its
collection intact.
Over the
course of his research, Angell has arrived at a strikingly different
perspective on restitution. “In the conventional discourse around
repatriation,” he says, “contested objects are like pawns. They may be
fantastic and big and old, but essentially they are being employed as a symbolic
wedge, which two countries with grievances against each other can use to get
what they want.” The testimonies he has been gathering amount to an argument
that the pawns may have their own agency. As Angell puts it: “These stories
seem to suggest that the objects themselves are restless.”
The British
Museum has about 8m items in its collection, and new acquisitions are being
made all the time. The artefacts include sacred objects from all over the world
– tomb guardians, reliquaries, statues of deities and demons – and more than
6,000 human remains. By rights the British Museum ought to be one of the most
haunted institutions on the planet.
Irving Finkel,
a curator in the museum’s Middle East department, reckons it is a fruitful
place to look for ghosts “for lots of reasons”. Finkel is interested in magic
and demonology: with his long, white beard and circular glasses, he’s the
epitome of a scholar who spends his time deciphering cuneiform inscriptions in
Sumerian and Babylonian. His views on the supernatural are more surprising.
Throughout history, he says, many cultures have considered ghosts a fact of
life. He argues that the belief in some form of spiritual lingering after death
is deep-seated in the human psyche. Our current relative scepticism – only
about half of the British population professes to believe in ghosts – is “an
anomaly”, he says.
To his great
annoyance, Finkel has never actually seen a ghost himself. He puts that down to
a lack of sensitivity on his part. But he reckons the museum offers plenty of
opportunities. “One, there are lots of dead bodies here,” he says. “Then
there’s lots of curators who’ve spent their entire lives here and some of them
died on the premises.”
The British
Museum, which opened its doors on Great Russell Street in 1759, has been
accumulating voraciously from the beginning. The original collection was
bequeathed by Hans Sloane, an Ulsterman whose lucrative career as a physician
and income from his wife’s slave plantations in Jamaica allowed him to amass
some 71,000 items – manuscripts, medals, preserved animals, shells – through a
vast network of contacts across the British Empire. After he died in 1753,
Sloane’s vision for a free public museum dedicated to the ideal of universal
knowledge began to take shape.
It was not an
entirely new concept. The museum is a legacy of the ancient world, though the
Musæum at Alexandria, home of the famous library, brought together great
scholars rather than artefacts. During the Renaissance, collectors assembled
Wunderkammern, cabinets of curiosities. But Sloane, according to his biographer
James Delbourgo, was “original in calling for a universal museum in both
senses: a gathering of all the things of the world open to all the citizens of
the world.” His project was driven by the Enlightenment compulsion to classify
the world by pinning it down, bagging it and putting it behind glass.
By the turn of
the 19th century antiquities were flooding into the museum from overseas at an
extraordinary rate. Few people seemed to mind or notice the oddity of calling a
museum “British” when it contained objects that were anything but. By 1801,
when the British army seized the Rosetta Stone from the French in Egypt, Lord
Elgin had already begun stripping marble statues and panels from the Parthenon.
Much of the current debate around restitution has its roots in that period.
European powers roamed the globe, divided it between them and sent the
treasures home. Not everything was acquired illegally. Some items were bought,
exchanged or received as gifts – though there’s a question as to how freely a
gift is given, if it’s handed over to a man at the head of a platoon of
bayonets.
Many museums
in the West argue that communities sometimes don’t want artefacts back because
they lack the resources to care for them. As borders have shifted and kingdoms
been succeeded by modern states, it’s not always clear to whom, exactly, a
centuries-old item should be returned. Better to keep the objects where they
are, goes the argument: accessible to visitors, and preserved for future
generations to study and admire. Publicly, the British Museum has barely
reckoned with its colonial past. When Ahdaf Soueif, an Egyptian author,
resigned from the museum’s board of trustees in July 2019, she expressed
disappointment at its inaction on restitution, as well as its association with
BP. The British Museum, which discourages employees from commenting on the
subject, has a standard response to enquiries about restitution: “The integrity
of the collection should be maintained.” (Hartwig Fischer, the British Museum’s
director, declined to comment for this article.) Yet it’s not clear exactly
what kind of integrity an assemblage of items so broad and diffuse really has.
When
confronted with the plethora of ghost stories from the museum, an obvious
interpretation is that they are manifestations of disquiet about the
institution’s heritage. Jeffrey Andrew Weinstock, an American scholar who
writes about the supernatural in the arts, reckons that hauntings are often
observed when official narratives repress “an untold story that calls into
question the veracity of the authorised version of events”. Yet Angell hasn’t
noticed any guilt or anger among the employees he’s interviewed: most of them
seem comfortable with the objects under their watch. He’s heard a few stories
that deal directly with illicitly acquired objects, such as the caryatid in
Room 19 that Lord Elgin tore from the Parthenon (according to legend, the
graceful marble statue could be heard weeping inside her crate as she was
shipped to England). But these tales came to Angell from outside the
institution.
Ghost stories
at the British Museum are nothing new. In the 1910s and 1920s the Egyptian
department received stacks of letters calling for the return of artefacts that were
believed to be cursed, according to Roger Luckhurst, a professor of literature
at Birkbeck College in London, who has written a book on Western culture’s dark
fascination with mummies.
Certain
members of the museum hierarchy are conscious of heightened friction around
particular items. When I asked Jim Peters, a collections manager in the
Britain, Europe and Prehistory department, what he makes of Angell’s idea about
restless objects, he tiptoed around the question. “I would agree with him to a
certain extent,” he said. “It’s very important the pieces are here. But having
said that, there are pieces that I think are out of sync being here.” He went
on: “There are certain objects that, if they were in the correct context, would
still have a purpose.” These, he says, declining to give specific examples,
“are the restless objects”.
Personally, I
found the idea difficult to get my head around. How could inanimate lumps of
wood, rock or metal open doors or set off alarms? Surely this was just a case
of humans imbuing them with powers in the absence of obvious explanations of
the phenomena. But when I put Angell’s theory to Fiona Candlin, a colleague of
Luckhurst’s at Birkbeck, she seemed more amenable. Candlin, a professor of
museology, had shadowed overnight security staff earlier in her career. She
heard them bid “goodnight” to dead bodies on display and picked up a couple of
ghost stories along the way.
Before that,
Candlin had spent time in the British Museum investigating why many people feel
compelled to touch objects in galleries, especially when expressly forbidden
from doing so. Some people feel an item to understand how it’s made, but for
others, the instinct is more primal. “They had a sense that if they touched it,
it gave them a conduit to the past and put them in actual connection with
people who had lived,” she said: “So this block had been carried by an Egyptian
slave, and if you touched it, it was like touching him.”
Many of us
share a similar attachment to our own most emotionally valuable possessions,
says Candlin. Your grandfather’s glasses are not just lens and frame, “they are
like a bit of your granddad, and you can’t bloody throw them away, because it
would be like throwing away a bit of your granddad.” Candlin reckons that many
visitors to the British Museum believe that particular objects have inherent
power. Gallery staff told her that they’d often see devotees attempting to
commune with four black stone statues of Sekhmet, a mighty lion-headed goddess
known as “she who mauls”, which dominate a corner of the Egyptian sculpture
gallery. Candlin also heard about Christian visitors holding up wooden crosses
or glass vials next to the relics of saints in order to channel their energies.
“That’s a really clear situation where someone thinks that the object does have
power and that power can be conveyed,” Candlin says.
Lissant
Bolton, keeper of the Africa, Oceania and the Americas department at the
British Museum, tells me of visitors who treat objects in the collection “as
living identities”. Some regard them as ancestors. One potent example looms
over the entrance to the Living and Dying gallery, directly behind the Great
Court. Hoa Hakananai’a is a four-tonne statue of a human figure hewn from
brownish lava rock, with deep-set eyes, pursed lips and a gentle pot belly. The
Rapa Nui, the indigenous people of Easter Island – whose governor visited the
British Museum in 2018 to campaign for the figure’s return – consider it to be
an actual living entity. “This is no rock,” the president of the Rapa Nui
Council of Elders said last year. “It embodies the spirit of an ancestor,
almost like a grandfather. This is what we want returned to our island – not
just a statue.”
The
restitution of the dead is particularly sensitive. Many religions and cultures
have a tradition of burying human remains, so it can be offensive to find
bodies ending up in a museum instead. Several people told Angell during
interviews that they felt uneasy about the presence of dead bodies in the
building. Phil Heary, who worked at the museum for 29 years, recalled
unsettling experiences in a long row of rooms where 19 mummies from Ancient
Egypt are on display. On one occasion, alone in the galleries amid the wizened
faces and desiccated corpses, he felt the temperature plummet for no apparent
reason. “It was like walking into a freezer,” said Heary, a burly north
Londoner who now works in a supermarket bakery not far from the museum. “My
stomach turned over. The feel of the gallery was – you wanted to get out. It
was scary…I’m a great believer that, wherever you’re buried, you should stay
there. A lot of the mummies there should be back in their graves.”
Emily Taylor,
who worked as an assistant in the Egypt department for ten years until 2015 and
regularly handled human remains, takes a different view. She got used to the
leathery skin and still-intact hair of millennia-old corpses, as well as the
sweetish smell of decay that was released when showcases were opened after long
periods. “When we worked on exhibitions, the mummies would be referred to by
name,” Taylor tells me. “In Ancient Egyptian culture, that’s part of their
death rite: they wanted people to be spoken about – that’s how you kept them
alive. Even though this person is not in their proper resting place, they are
being kept alive by being written about, being spoken about, by being shown in
the museum.”
As I’ve
wandered through the museum’s galleries over the past year, I’ve often thought
about the power of these artefacts. If the objects are in some sense alive, or
if ghostly entities accompanied them to their current resting place in central
London, are they furious about being amid the bright spotlights and thronging
crowds? Or are they glad to be the centre of attention – enlivened, even, by
the public’s gaze? One day, weeks before the outbreak of coronavirus, when
visitors still brushed past each other with scant regard for social distancing
and pressed their faces against the glass to get a look at the mummies, I
attempted to tap in to the energies of the collection.
In the
Enlightenment gallery, the grandest in the museum, I stared for a long time at
John Dee’s black obsidian mirror, which the Elizabethan polymath reportedly
used to commune with angels. I climbed up and down the North and East Stairs,
which are said to be haunted by shadows and disembodied voices. I even toured
the museum with a medium called Patsy Sorenti, whom Angell had invited along.
She said she picked up several presences around the building, including the
sound of ghostly feet running across the Sutton Hoo gallery.
Despite all
this, I witnessed no supernatural activity myself. The sceptical part of me,
which I hoped would be cracked open by some paranormal epiphany, remained
stubbornly intact. But, over months pondering Angell’s ghost stories and
haunting the galleries myself, I experienced a gradual shift in my
understanding of what a museum is. “All museums are strange places,” Candlin
told me. “You put loads of things together that otherwise wouldn’t exist
together and that have been utterly disassociated from where they come from –
it’s quite a strange thing to do. Not all cultures do that, but we’ve got used
to walking around spaces looking at objects that have been removed from use and
meaning.”
At the British
Museum you can bridge chasms of space and time simply by walking from one room
to the next. You breeze past objects that speak of lives lived and loved;
religion, dominion and death jostle with one another for space. Whatever you
think about the possibility of ghostly activity, that is inherently uncanny.
Nowhere else are so many objects which were once dear to their creators and
owners so profoundly, almost comically, out of place.
On my last
visit, after spending a morning watching couples take selfies next to the
mummies, I began to imagine how the British Museum might appear to the objects
themselves. In the Great Court, I considered two giant quartzite heads of
Pharaoh Amenhotep III, over 3,000 years old. Then I turned around to see what
they were looking at with such infinite composure: a display of popular-history
books and mini umbrellas for sale outside the museum gift shop.
In the
Assyrian gallery, I marvelled at the stone reliefs of Ashurnasirpal II, king of
Assyria from 883BC to 859BC. His “standard inscription”, which he had carved
across each wall panel in his palace, makes Shelley’s Ozymandias seem
self-effacing. He refers to himself as “the king who acts with the support of
the great gods, and whose hand has conquered all lands, who has subjugated all
the mountains and received their tribute, taking hostages and establishing his
power over all countries.” Today, his inscription hangs in a poky room more
than 2,300 miles away from where it was carved in stone. But at least the
Assyrian king’s 2,900-year-old declaration still receives widespread attention.
The overwhelming majority of the museum’s collection – around 99% of it, though
much of this comprises stones, flints and other fragments – lies in storage,
hidden from the curiosity, admiration or perplexity of the general public.
Angell would
love to take a closer look, but securing access is tricky (he’s working on it).
For now, millions of objects remain in the dark, save for an occasional glance
from a departmental assistant or the nightly ministrations of security guards,
who switch the lights on for a brief moment to make sure nothing is out of
place, before closing the door and continuing their rounds. “Down there”, says
Angell, “things just stew in their own juices, indefinitely, for ever.”
Are
ghosts haunting the British Museum? By Killian Fox. The Economist, April 28, 2020.
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