Ghosts in Ancient Mesopotamia: Prof. Irving Finkel's Discoveries

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00:01:34 Joining me on the podcast today is Professor Irving Finkel. A British philologist or someone who studies the history of languages. Professor Finkel is also an assyriologist, someone who specializes in the archaeological, historical, cultural and linguistic study of assyria and the rest of ancient Mesopotamia. He's the assistant keeper of ancient Mesopotamian script, languages and cultures in the Department of the Middle East in the British Museum, where he specializes in cunei form inscriptions on tablets of clay from ancient Mesopotamia. In his book, The First Ghosts a Haunted History Chronicles of Ancient Ghosts and Ghost Stories from the British Museum, curator Irving Finkel has embarked upon an ancient ghost hunt, scouring these tablets to unlock the secrets of the Sumerians, Babylonians and Assyrians to breathe new life into the first ghost stories ever written.

00:02:31 In The First Ghosts, he uncovers an extraordinarily rich seam of ancient spirit wisdom which has remained hidden for nearly 4000 years, covering practical details of how to live with ghosts, how to get rid of them and bring them back, and how to avoid becoming one, as well as exploring more philosophical questions. What are ghosts? Why does the idea of them remain so powerful despite the lack of concrete evidence? And what do they tell us about being human? There are few things more in common across cultures than the belief in ghosts.

00:03:07 Ghosts inhabit something of the very essence of what it is to be human. Whether we personally believe or not, we are all aware of ghosts and the rich mythologies and rituals surrounding them. They have inspired, fascinated and frightened us for centuries. Yet most of us are only familiar with the vengeful apparitions of Shakespeare or the ghostly specters haunting the pages of 19th century Gothic literature. But their origins are much, much older, as we're about to discover as we chat with Irving.

00:03:48 Hello, Dr. Irving. Thank you so much for joining me this evening. I'm very excited to talk to you. It's a big pleasure.

00:03:55 I'm very glad, very glad indeed. Do you want to just start by telling us a little bit about your incredible background, more about yourself? Well, my credible background I don't know. Well, I come from a family. I was the oldest of five children.

00:04:10 My father was a dental surgeon and my mother a teacher. Everyone had to read books all the time, but also we went to the British Museum a lot when I was little, and I decided quite early on in life that I wanted to work in the British Museum, and I was very fortunate that that's what happened. So after university and PhD and stuff, there was a job advertised, and I went for it and got it, and I've been there ever since. So I got the job in 1979, September 1979. So I spent the whole of my adult life in the British Museum, and we're about to carry on doing that for another adult life on the end of it, but we'll see what happens.

00:04:51 I'm so jealous. I just think it's an incredible place to work, really, and to be part of all that history is just phenomenal to me. Just gives me goosebumps. Puts the hair on the back of my neck up. Very lucky.

00:05:07 Well, I can tell you something that I think if you do the same job most people don't do the same job all of their lives, but if you do work in the same place for a long time, people go into kind of automatic gear. And they don't notice what they're doing until they're at their desk. And they don't notice what they're doing until they've gone home. That sort of thing. But in fact, the Working Museum, museum itself is so marvelous, and the collections are so marvelous, that it never devolves into a humdrum kind of experience, because there's always something you've never seen before in the cases, and then there's all the excited public and all the other stuff, and then the actual work is very fascinating.

00:05:42 So I've had a very privileged existence, because the field I work in, which is Canaiform, ancient Babylonian, Sumerian, cane form, is a rather shareshade matter when it comes to careers. Offices at school, they don't often say, oh, well, you don't like physics or football, perhaps you should learn cuneiform and work in a museum. They don't say that very often, and there aren't many jobs. And it's a funny kind of matter because the subject of ancient Mesopotamia, which the whole culture existed side by side with ancient Egypt not very far away, and everybody in the world knows all about ancient Egypt, but they don't know all about Mesopotamia, and it's a very fascinating thing. And lots of important claims on people's attention took place there.

00:06:30 For example, writing almost certainly began in that part of the world, and it soon turned into a proper script where you could write languages down properly, and that was a momentous thing for mankind. And the most important thing about all that, really, is that the Sumerians and the Babylonians, who all long extinct, course, and for millennia, they wrote all their messages, really, on pieces of clay by pressing signs into the surface of the clay. And you wouldn't think clay was such a wonderful writing medium, because people associate it with messy things, with kids or making pottery and getting it everywhere. And in fact, it was a special kind of excellent clay. And the upshot of it was that when they'd written on these tablets, written the messages down, spelled them out in their signs, pressed into the clay, they last forever.

00:07:26 So in the ground there are many, many thousands of inscriptions which have come up from the ground but untold numbers which must still be there. Because when people wrote these tablets, if they got buried accidentally or deliberately, whatever happened to them in the past, they got covered up and things they're still there to be rescued and to be read unless somebody deliberately destroyed them. So we have profusion of documents and they're all about daily life and state life at the same time because we have things to do with the court, things to do with army and diplomatic stuff and diplomatic marriages and politics and all that. And then we have things to do with the religion temples and the temple libraries and the rituals that the priests carried out sometimes regularly, sometimes once a year, things of that kind. And then we have private letters and contracts and business documents people being rude to one another about their debts and why don't you answer my letter and are you my brother or are you not my brother?

00:08:33 And that sort of stuff. And then we have the other side of things. We have dictionaries, ancient dictionaries and ancient lists of cane form signs which the scholars compiled. And then we have magic material and medicine and divination and all sorts of stuff. So the British Museum is a storehouse of this material because in the 19th century, when they first started the really big excavations, so you have a thing like a small mountain, which is generations of buildings and streets and so forth, laid on top of one another as one collapses or one falls who is destroyed, and other people come and they build on top.

00:09:16 And they build on top. So you end up with a sort of mountain of habitation. And in the 19th century, when they started, about 1850, they started digging in what turned out to be the Assyrian capitals. They sometimes found very large numbers of documents. And because of the nature of the world then the political division of the countries and who was in charge.

00:09:39 The Turkish administration ruled in what later became Iraq. Of course, it wasn't Iraq then and the material was divided and a lot of it came to London. So after many years of excavations we ended up well, I don't know how many, 100 and 3140 thousand documents, perhaps even more, with little bits and then they cover 3000 years of time. So it is the most wonderful resource because all these documents were written for the time, for persons, for people around in their daily lives. And none of them was ever written, really, with the idea that strange people in museums 5000 years later would be trying to read their words.

00:10:23 So we have all these things which are real from real life. And sometimes the messages are mundane and not so riveting to most people, but very often they are. You get thrown into a human dilemma or a human drama or all sorts of things happening. And people were worried in ancient times and this is really important, about the same things as they are today. For example, dying young, not having children, about disease, warfare, drought and all those horrible things.

00:10:58 You can see that human beings were preoccupied with the same preoccupations as people ever since and that they responded to them in a very comparable way. So as I see these people who survive in this mass of bits of clay with writing on, when we read the messages, they come out as real people and sometimes even like listening in on a telephone conversation. When you have letters that go one way or the other or disputes that are settled in front of a magistrate, all these things open up a window. And the upshot of it is that it's a miraculous matter that we have all this written material which gives us such a rounded and informative picture of the world all that time ago, because the writing disappeared by about the first century Ad. When obscurity was replaced by other writing, other religions, other nations, so forth, with the march of time, of course.

00:12:01 And so it became under the ground and hidden and it had to be dug up again and brought back to life. And that's the work that I and my colleagues do. We have all this treasure. And to somehow bring it into a form where people who are busy or not busy or interested or not interested can at least get some idea of all this stuff and how the human race, as I see it, is one species in the same kind of mess. I think what's quite profound is that, like you said, I mean, my background is education.

00:12:34 So I fully agree with you when you said that we all know about the ancient Greeks, we all know about the ancient Egyptians and we teach it in our schools. But here we have something older and yet we don't have that same knowledge and understanding coming through in education, in our teaching, in classrooms. And what you've got is something that is a language so very old, which kind of changes some of the narrative and the thinking, I think, about when we consider the field of the paranormal today and people's understanding of the field of the paranormal and their belief system. Here we have something so very old that kind of shows this connection with people who have, in some ways, many of the same beliefs and thoughts and ideas as we do but in other ways different. And for many in the paranormal field, they kind of think of the birth of spiritualism and the Victorian ghost story and the beginnings of societies like Haunted History Chronicles as the beginning moment when the concept of ghosts and the afterlife really came to the fore.

00:13:43 But here you have the first examples of ghost stories yes. Images of ghosts being captured and spoken about and written about and recorded that shows just how prevalent this was as part of their society, as their culture. And that, I think, shifts something in that thinking process. And like I said, that beginning point is one that I think is so important to explore. And that's what you're doing.

00:14:08 Yes, well, I quite agree with you. One crucial point is that people who write about ghosts in the modern world seldom are in a position to distinguish between fraud and real things and fiction and fact and historical material and invention. The whole of the literature about ghosts is bedeviled by this kind of thing, so it's very difficult to sort anything out at all. And on top of that, most people, as you say, think it's roots, the roots of the beliefs or what you might call the paranormal that I'm not sure about the word are not so far back in time. But of course, if you look there's vast amounts of information left by the ancient Greeks about ghosts and the traditions about ghosts.

00:14:54 And in Latin, both languages furnish a very wide and revealing picture of how people thought about ghosts in the Greek and Roman world. And when you go back before that to the Mesopotamian, we have something which is about as far back as you can go in terms of writing and discover it. But the most important thing that occurred to me when I was writing this book that came to me was that we have a slew of documents about the kind of people who what ghosts are supposed to do. They're supposed to stay in the underworld, they're not supposed to come back, you're not supposed to be a troublesome person after you're dead. And what kind of people did come back and why and what you can do about it and how you banish them and what it means if you see them and rituals to get rid of them.

00:15:41 Some simple, some complex and also how to bring them up. Sometimes if you want to ask a question about the future, all those aspects of human interaction with the ghostly world are covered in cuneiform writing. So the thing is, you can put ghosts right on the map of Mesopotamia, right on the map before any of the other traditions that we know about. So this is a kind of historical flag stuck in the ground saying, this is as far back as we can go. But there's more to it than that.

00:16:14 And the issue devolves out of your point about the paranormal, because normal and paranormal are, of course, modern terms, and they are to some extent critical and cold and rather imprecise, because there's nobody I know who can define for a minute what the word normal means. It's a very difficult conundrum. But the point about ghosts is this there was a basic belief that the dead went down to the underworld and that's where they were. And for a whole range of possible reasons, individuals came back in order to annoy the living. So the wide range of different inscriptions in cuneiform from Mesopotamia which bear on this issue, established for certain, at least in my mind, and I wrote about it hopefully convincingly, that for the ancient Mesopotamia person, ghosts were part of daily life.

00:17:16 And this, I think, is very significant, because in the modern world, people either believe in ghosts or they don't believe in ghosts, or they just don't know. There are three categories of modern response to ghosts. And in Mesopotamia, ancient Mesopotamia, before the time of Jesus, back 2000 BC, that kind of time, there was no issue about whether somebody believed in ghosts or didn't. And if someone sent to their neighbor, I saw my auntie yesterday and walking down the corridor into the bedroom, I couldn't believe my eyes. And the neighbor didn't say, well, come on, don't tell me you believe in ghosts.

00:17:56 Woman of your age? That's ridiculous. There was never any such conversation because everybody knew that ghosts were part of daily life. And I think this is a very significant matter which has not been clarified in earlier writing about the subject, because they never started from this perspective. And if you make the assumption, which I strongly do, that this is true, that for everybody involved, ghosts were absolutely normal.

00:18:26 In other words, they weren't paranormal, you have to explain the difference or what happened between what I consider to be the default position, which is that human beings do believe in ghosts and then what happened to it. So the default position is ghosts live in the world that we know, and that's part of it, and you have to put up and deal with it. That's the basic position. And then what happened is that you have in the world, you have the advent of religion, and especially monotheistic religion, with one God. This whole conception that there's only one God means that my God is the real one and yours isn't.

00:19:07 And it's one of the things which has fermented the worst kind of religious warfare. This kind of nonsense, that issue of the religious input plus the scientific input meant that what I would call the natural attitude towards this in Western society, and especially in complex urban societies on the whole, goes under the radar. People don't talk about it because everybody else, they think, will laugh at them and mock them. So the pressure of these other things, people in clerical garb and people in white coats on the whole had had the effect of suppressing this matter. But there are many, many parts of the world you can go to where the same issue exists.

00:19:52 You go into, shall we say, a small village miles from anywhere in country X, it doesn't matter which. And you sit down under a tree and speak to a grandmother. Though I'm interested, Pema, do you believe in ghosts? This grandmother will say to you, what kind of question is that? Do you want to hear about all the ghosts I've seen?

00:20:11 And you might be there for two days. Because people in many parts of the world still preserve what I regard to be as the kind of natural human attitude towards the whole matter. Now, this has nothing to do with whether ghosts exist or not technically or whether people see them or not technically. All that interests me is what the historical view in writing has been by human beings about the matter of ghosts. That is the most important thing to me.

00:20:43 And all the other side issues, whether you can prove things, whether you can't know and all that. I'm not very interested in it because I don't think it's very helpful. And the other thing is, when you write a book about ghosts, if you ever do this, you meet a lot of people who, when they know this, talk to you about it and ask questions about it. And I've met a lot of people who have told me that they saw a ghost when they were a kid or their auntie told them they saw a ghost. And there's absolutely no reason on all other sides to do with this person to believe for a moment that they are deluded or that they are making up or lying.

00:21:21 Because some people have told me things that happen to them which make the hair stand up on the back of your neck just as much as walking through the British Museum galleries sometimes very extraordinary things. And people who, for example, a lady of about 75 told me it's something that happened in her family when she was a teenager. She'd never talked about it since. But she went to my lecture and she came up afterwards and said, I think I ought to tell you this. I've never told anybody else.

00:21:45 And the way she was talking about it, I could quite believe she'd never told anybody else and certainly not a thing at dinner parties or anything. And she told me this story, which is very compelling. And I couldn't believe for a moment that the right explanation was that she was deluded. She thought she saw, but she didn't. It was a trick of the light.

00:22:03 It was all this kind of stuff that people say. So I feel that the overwhelming testimony in writing and in tradition for this as a feature of the universe is so strong that I'm not in a position to say that it's nonsense and I'm very sympathetic to it. And when I wrote the first ghost book, I just wanted to get, as I said, the flag pointed that ghosts were not invented in Germany in the 16th century Ad. But they are a very, very ancient thing that go back to the beginnings that we can see. And therefore they need to be considered as a human phenomenon, not as a German social matter or an English social matter or something to do with the Victoria.

00:22:46 It's a basic human matter, which I think goes back to the beginning of the species. Even I think what you just said echoes precisely what I think that just those words are human matter. This is us, this is who we are. And it's the evolution of that thought process and things that stay with us. And I think they're important things to discuss and to know about.

00:23:11 And I completely echo everything you just said. I think it's something that should be known. And again, I come back to what I said earlier. This is where you've got something that tilts some of that thinking on its head, I think, and takes us right back to some of these very earliest examples. And from there we can then start building up this picture of what do we learn over time about cultures and society and other people in terms of our belief systems around death, dying, the soul and the afterlife.

00:23:40 What does that tell us about us as human beings? The fact that we're also interested in talking about these things? Yes, that is exactly right. One of the wonderful things about the Mesopotamians is they didn't have a hell. They didn't have the idea that what you did in life was subject to weighing and balancing, and they decide whether you go up or down or stay in the middle.

00:24:04 There was none of that panky panky which has caused endless misery in the world. That idea is obscene, in my opinion. Absolutely. And the Babylonians, whatever troubles they had, they never had that trouble. So they're very matter of fact about it all.

00:24:23 And I think myself that if you establish an agreement, or at least a working hypothesis, that the ascription to the conception that when people die, something survives of them, of their body, of their personality, and it goes down or it goes up, if you subscribe to that basic idea, then it becomes automatically a human matter. I mean, after all, all clergymen who comfort the dead, they comfort the mourners for the dead. They say that the spirit of your uncle has gone up to heaven. Or they speak quite blithely about an invisible part of a human being which disappears from the body when the body is dead. And they're quite merrily talking about this spirit and what happens to it and all the rest of it.

00:25:13 Well, in my opinion, there's no difference between a clergyman's description of a spirit of a dead person going to where it should go. And a ghost. The only absolutely clear difference between the two conceptions is that ghosts are sometimes visible. So my thesis is that even the church, and I don't mean just one church, I mean even religious institutions, which all hold, at least almost all of them, hold the idea that something survives after death of a person. That is no different from the principle of the ghost, except that you don't see them normally.

00:25:49 So if you're prepared to consider things in this global way, then you end up with a conclusion perhaps that maybe some people, perhaps more sensitive than others, more alert, more whatever it might be, are more inclined to see these things and other people who don't because of their nature. For example, there are many people who are colorblind. And that doesn't mean that Van Gogh or Rubens or somebody who saw these colors was making it up or pretending that they could see colors. It's just that the receptors in people's brains are different to that's. The same with being able to sing in key and being tone deaf.

00:26:30 There's some kind of variation there, so who knows? But the situation might not be that. The real point here is that some people see them and some don't, which is a very different matter from saying they don't exist or they do exist. So in terms of your book and some of the content that you cover and you discuss so brilliantly, what would you say people can really discover and learn from this civilization in terms of what they believe about death, the afterlife, the soul burial practices? What is it that these tablets really reveal as to what was their core belief systems around those things?

00:27:14 Well, I think the main principles are, of course, that the dead were buried. Of course, that's not always the case, and it's certainly not always the case around the world, but it's by far the default position that the dead are put underground as soon as possible for obvious reasons. And because of this, because that goes back to the very beginning of the species, the conception is that whoever's left of your famous Uncle Henry, uncle Henry's body is under the ground and being eaten by weevils. But the bit that made Uncle Henry Uncle Henry is also down there. And that the place where these ethereal representations of human beings go have the register called and do what they have to do in the underworld is under the world.

00:28:07 And I don't know, I couldn't say whether there are or are not societies where they thought the dead went up instead of down. But it's quite helpful in this sort of area to consider what people call the default position. And I would say that the idea that the underworld or wherever the bits went, the default view of that was it was down. So there are many parts of the world where people are buried very quickly, even today. That was certainly the rule in Mesopotamia, because it was hot.

00:28:37 And of course, there's a very strong reason to get on with it. And religions like Islam and Judaism, who have their roots in the same part of the world and in fact live in the same part of the world, always bury their dead very promptly in the same kind of way. So it's a practical thing which in later times becomes a religious duty, and it's hedged about with religious explanation and religious tradition. But the basic reason is jolly obvious, and sometimes people are buried with things. In fact, in the ancient times, people almost always were buried with things because they literally believed that whatever survived of Uncle Henry would be going somewhere where he might need a sword and a plow share and a chess set, and they put them in the grave for him to take on his journey, who knows where.

00:29:31 So archaeology in general shows that the dead are buried with things. And sometimes when the population is very impoverished, there might be a few beads or this and that, where they can't spare real things and valuable things for such a purpose. And then you have things like Tutankamoon's tomb, where there were three rooms full of gold and all the rest of it, that the principle is the same, that the dead person will be going somewhere where they will need material. Now, in the modern world, there are plenty cases where this goes on, but on the whole, certainly in the Western world, people are not usually buried with objects. And if they are, it is sometimes something of which they were very fond and people thought they couldn't hardly be without them, or a piece of jewelry or something of the kind which nobody would want to wear afterwards, because it was I don't know what.

00:30:26 But you do find that happening, but not specifically, because they will be needed in the world to come. So there's been some primary shift in the vision of what happens to the invisible part of a person, that the agreement is that it leaves the body and it goes somewhere. And the presumption is that it's happy and enjoys life there. But the literal giving people things to take with, on the whole, has been supplanted in more modern times by words and prayers and things, and not actually putting in their favorite wheelbarrow or a sports car or something. There are actually, of course, parts of the world where there are special ceremonies for the dead, where exactly that kind of thing happens, sometimes made of plaster or wood, but there are special cases.

00:31:22 But in general, perhaps it's fair to generalize. Certainly in Europe and in America, people don't, on the whole, bury things with their dead. But the idea of the spirit leaving the body and going somewhere is it what I would call it a universal principle. And also the idea that if. They're not happy, they come back.

00:31:45 Now it's very clear that this is true in Mesopotamia. That the same tradition occurs quite often in the modern world where example, there is a belief that when you have, I don't know, a public house in Yorkshire where they sometimes see a girl with blonde hair hanging around the stables 11:00 at night. And it's supposed to be a girl who was trampled to death by a racehorse in 1643. And sometimes she comes back and everybody knows who she is. There are stories like that all over the place and it's not neither here nor there, but if there's any truth or historical truth in them, it doesn't make any difference.

00:32:22 The principle is something shared with antiquity that in cases of violent death or many other sorts of things like that, it was generally believed that the troublesome specter of the dead person would hang about where it happened, as it were, visiting the scene of the crime. And this is a shared thing in many cultures, this idea. And it's one of the things which this study of the ancient Babylonian things brings out forcibly, that people go back to their old stomping grounds and they don't get on a train and go abroad, they hang about where they used to live and where the great grandchildren are and all that kind of thing. So I think the way I see it is that the stronger historical religions, which have very many traditions and belief details as their apparatus and their trappings, overlay the simple thing about burial and why people are buried and what they think happens to the person inside, which is at root very similar with all sorts of other stuff, so that outwardly they look different and they ring in a different tune. But I don't see it that way.

00:33:43 I think the essence of it is all to do with a universal matter and it's rather endearing, in a sense, if you wear a white coat and look at this stuff down a sympathetic microscope as being the human behavior. If I were from another planet and forced to study death, burial and traditions in the world and only had a week to write a big article about it, I think I would find it very endearing. That the struggle and it's all understandable, it's all essentially extremely human and normal, it seems to me. So I'm not sure about the paranormal, what that really means. It's very confusing.

00:34:36 Once I gave a lecture in the Psychic Society that you mentioned before and they have a marvelous library and all sorts of materials there. And when I started writing this book, I went and gave a talk. And the gist of my argument was that ghosts recorded and discussed over such a wide period of history and such a wide period of geography that the testimony is overwhelming. And I didn't really see how anybody who thought they were a scientist could possibly deny that this was something to be reckoned with. And I thought it was something to be reckoned with.

00:35:12 And this, and this, and this, talking like that about it. And when I was finished, chairman stood out and said, well, thank you very much for the lecture. It's very interesting. He said, of course, there was no need for you to argue so forcefully about resistance of ghosts in this room because we've all seen lots of them and we are entirely in agreement with. You preaching to the converted in a classic way.

00:35:39 And I thought that was marvelous. I really thought it was marvelous. So, I mean, there are ghosts in the British Museum and lots of people have seen them. I've never seen them. It's jolly annoying to me, and I always wanted to see one.

00:35:50 And I think, quite frankly, I deserve it. Now, having stood up for them and written about them. I think it's about time some ghost, not necessarily a Babylonian, it could be quite different sort of ghost, might come and tap me on the shoulder one night and said, well, we like your book. We read it. Good man or something frightening.

00:36:11 It would be lovely. That would be incredible, wouldn't it? The trouble is, nobody would believe me. See, at the moment, I skirt round these issues and when I'd been to literary festivals and talked about this book from lots of different angles, and usually someone says, I have to ask you this do you believe in ghosts? And I always answer by saying, well, I know a lot of people who do something like that and not committing myself.

00:36:38 But I find that it's very difficult for me, having dipped into this subject. I mean, it's a lifetime and more of reading because there's so much extraordinary stuff. And it's not just novels and Hollywood rubbish, but anthropologists, for example, who traveled in lots of different places missionaries and scholars who were posted in parts of the world and lived there for years and wrote dictionaries and wrote about customs and marriage customs and wrote all those things. And they didn't write about them as imperialist monsters. They wrote about of sympathy with them because they lived there and they saw their lives and they learned their languages and sometimes for the first time ever, they gave them an alphabet to write down their own scriptures or the Christian scriptures, all that.

00:37:34 And those sorts of people, very often in their anthropological works have a chapter on this kind of thing. And I talked to so many different sorts of people that really I find it very difficult to be anything other than the sympathetics to the whole idea. I think it's normalizing the discussion, and I think it's something that you touched upon already. Here. We have examples historically where talking about death and dying and what lay beyond was normal part of everyday life.

00:38:03 And it's something that modern society, I think, tries to acknowledge. It, but it's not necessarily spoken about as openly. And there may be reasons for that fear of what comes next or introduction of science and the fact that we do try and stop things from happening, but it's an inevitability, and so therefore, it is part of who we are. It's part of our culture, it's part of our experiences. And I think there's something that we can learn about trying to normalize that discussion again and seeing what earlier civilizations, history tells us about treating the dead, treating this subject and the belief systems around ghosts, dying, death, burial and all of these other things and how we treat dead.

00:38:53 But there is some benefit accrued from a comparative historical view because in Greek there is evidence for people who didn't believe in ghosts there because they were more modern in many ways and no more intelligent. But their intellectual clarity was different from the Babylonian world. And there are Greeks lots of evidence for doubt or skepticism about ghosts. And then as you go on through history, it becomes more articulate. And of course, as I say, with modern religion and modern science, it becomes something that people don't really come out with.

00:39:39 They don't talk about it. It's a very odd matter. So I think what we really need is to have what will be really good will be to get a collection made of testimony, not rubbishy things. It's quite easy to distinguish between rubbish and reality and people say well, what are you going to do? Someone says this do you believe them or not?

00:40:05 But if you're going to do it, it's up to you to exercise a kind of discretion. But for example, I've heard from two people that if ever you want to talk to someone who's ever who's seen ghosts and never talks about it, then you should talk to nurses who work in wards at night. Because people who work in the night wards. If you ask them, get them in the right mode and ask them about ghosts, they will tell you that they see people walking through the wall, looking for the drug cupboard and looking out of the window. None of them bats an eyelid because lots and lots and lots and lots and lots of people have died in those wards.

00:40:49 Lots of people have died in those wards and it's not that you have credulous nurses who get really nervous in case something happens. The person I talked to, his mum was a nurse and he said if you want to go around and have a cup of tea with her you'll be staggered because she and her colleagues live in a world where the issue whether they believe in ghosts is not either here nor there. And I've heard similar things like that from a wide range of different sorts of people, and it's a bit hard to believe that they're all deluded or they're all making it up. Because when you have someone who's matter of fact not noisy and not all that keen on talking about it, that gives you an idea of it being a sensible point to ask some questions about it. Absolutely.

00:41:41 And again, coming back to this idea that it's not something that we're only experiencing now, this seems to be this very much shared historical feeling and belief system. So again, it's worth discussing, it's worth looking at and exploring this journey and the experiences that people have had in all kinds of cultures all around the world since the very beginning.

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00:43:18 One thing that struck me about the book about this book following your earlier question is if you have an individual who, for example, had an experience which was very traumatic to do with this matter and when they had it. Nobody believed them. And so they never told anybody else again. And they buried it in the back of their mind. And then they thought, well, maybe I didn't really or maybe I didn't know that sort of this is not an uncommon matter.

00:43:45 And I think if somebody has a lurking thing in their subconscious or conscious mind about what actually it was, what happened, how real it was and everything, you don't have to read this book from beginning to end. But when you realize that this is something which has gone on since the beginning of time among Homo sapiens, I think it's rather encouraging that you don't necessarily have to doubt yourself entirely.

00:44:16 I don't believe in all the possible things that people can suggest to rule out when someone says what happened, what they saw. There's about 30 things, trick of the light and all that. You can think or they were drunk, or they were starving, or they were tired, or they had a hell of a day, or all that stuff, it's just nonsense. Because when people see these things, it's not an impact like squinting through a cracked lens and wondering what it is. It's something which affects them very powerfully.

00:44:51 That in itself is something significant, that it's not something you just rush aside and don't think twice about it. People who've had these experiences never really forget them, and I think they stay with them. So I don't know who one could recruit to take any kind of investigation further, because scientists, for example, don't like the subject. Because with science, you have to have something that you can demonstrate, and you can demonstrate repeatedly. You have to have a principle that you can prove by experiment.

00:45:26 Whenever you want to. It's always the same result. Well, you can never do that with ghosts. You couldn't do that. So it's not susceptible to that sort of proof, and it's always going to be testimony.

00:45:38 And the trouble is with, of course, in the 19th century and later, people took photographs and and what have you, and I don't know whether every single one was forged, but loads and loads them were. And it's like photographs of Pixies in the garden and God knows what else. They muddied the water dreadfully. For people who are really interested to investigate this matter backwards and forwards and sideways because you bump into all this rubbish. And that is a problem.

00:46:10 But anyone who's interested in the historical sources there's some good books now about the belief in ghosts in Greece and in Rome, with lots of texts translated so you can read what the Greeks thought about it. And also, there are other people in the Middle Ages who didn't know whether people really saw ghosts. They start to discuss did they really see a ghost or was it in their imagination? And that kind of thing. So you can see how the default position evolves into various phases until you get the situation which prevails in the modern world.

00:46:45 And I think it's more than that. I think it's this kind of understanding of some of the things that we again think and believe are only things that have only really happened in, say, the last few hundred years. Again, these are practices that are much, much older. I mean, I'm thinking in particular of the chapter where you're talking about the art of necromancy communicating with the dead. We think of seance tables and parlors in polite sitting rooms with mediums and communing with dead, through the dead, through tabletipping and all of these other Victorian type things.

00:47:24 But actually, again, divination communication with the dead. These are practices that are so much, much older. And again, speaking to what you were just saying about science, trying to ridicule spiritualism and the things that happened during that period because of the number of people that were faking it and sensationalizing it and all of the other things that we know about, but actually the root of what they were doing. These are something, again, that are part of who we are culturally going much, much further back. Yes.

00:47:58 And also, the people who did that table tapping thing often were looking for comfort as much as anything else and thinking that the dead would be on the veil and you could communicate with them and all that sort of thing. Yes, it's true what you say. It's a very big subject. And I thought when I wrote this book that what I would do is get a telling description of summing up the belief of such and such a place on the subject of ghosts say like from 20 different cultures, if I could find them. And just at the back of the book you could see how the tapestry of unfolding stuff where what's in common between the different traditions is very much stronger than the differences.

00:48:49 And this, I think, is one of the driving reasons why the study of antiquity there are two reasons why the study of antiquity is terrifically important. Because the similarities between the races of the human world and what they've done throughout their history and the way they've dealt with the great struggle of existence, the parallels between them the similarities are greater than the differences. There's all sorts of clothes and religious ideas and customs and this and that but the Homo sapiens inside is one species and what is in common between people is much more important especially in a time when the world is so fragmented. It's a kind of status of investigation which I think is on a high level and it's compounded by the illusion common among politicians who think that we are the most advanced stage of the human race now at this very moment especially in terms of them because they're the rulers. So human race has gone, have never been higher and they are the highest of the top.

00:50:07 And this is a massive, massive illusion because the more you know about history and ancient history the more it is absolutely impossible to demonstrate that any kind of evolution or any kind of improvement has ever been made in the historical period. People are just the same as ever and politicians are often hypocritical, liars, monsters and savage exploiters of everybody else now as they always have been and they are not at the forefront of evolution. So my idea is that as for evolution of human psyche it's either stop or reverse but it certainly isn't progress and it is quite humbling in a way. If you work with ancient inscriptions where people have been dead for 2000 or 3000 years and listening in on their voices there's enough there to convince me that if one met these people in the news agents when you were buying a bar of chocolate they might look very different and talk a funny language. But you would know once that you were, so to speak, brothers under the garb.

00:51:21 And I think that the more understanding is of phenomena which are human phenomena the less damage that can be done by the divisive things like religions engender war and all the other things that engender strife. All those things they will diminish. It's the only way they'll be made to diminish. And again, one of the aspects that I think is really fascinating that you explore in the book is this sense of magic and ritual when dealing with, say, malevolent spirits, demons or words that, again, have become something of different meaning, I think, because of religion. But you explore that, and again, you're taking us back to what this was in ancient Mesopotamia and how they dealt with it.

00:52:16 And again, it's kind of normalizing, something that has become something very different and a little bit more darker because of that religious undertone to it. Maybe. But don't forget, see, they didn't have the devil. No, this is a later invention of a well known church. They didn't have the devil.

00:52:35 But there were lots of demons and devils. And we know about some of them, their character, and some of them, we don't know much about them. And they wrought malice on the human race consistently. Ghosts sometimes did, if they were nasty ghosts, but not always. But demons and devils they were.

00:52:58 And they had to be driven out with magic, ritual and incantation. And the dreadful thing about them was you couldn't kill them. They were immortal. So if you were a good practitioner, you knew your magic, you knew about the good exorcistic spells, and there was a client who had this trouble with the ghost. You could go round there and perhaps you'd fasted for 12 hours before wore clean linen or something, and went round there and confronted this thing with Abrasia, with coals and incense and spells and sometimes with figurines and all that kind of stuff, and burying them in the ground.

00:53:38 And with this figurine, I bury you, you go down to the underworld and that sort of thing. Very powerful stuff, and real, because they did this. See, this is the other thing, and you can see there's a distinction between simple devices and expensive devices and cheap amulets and expensive amulets, which makes a kind of lot of sense. It's very fascinating. I'd like to meet one of these guys.

00:54:01 I have got lots of questions, but same here. I mean, it really is truly something that I think you could spend a lifetime immersing, exploring and asking questions and asking more questions, because it is so intriguing and interesting. Well, I've spent my lifetime so far with that time when someone said to Woody Allen, mr. Allen, do you think you'll live on after your death? No.

00:54:27 Do you think you'll live on after your death in your books and films? And Woody Allen said, yeah, but I'd rather live on in my apartment.

00:54:35 Yeah, absolutely. But it is just the opportunity to look at what it tells you and to be able to see it and to physically see an image. I mean, one of the things that, again, I think, is just hairs on the back of your neck moment is the very first example of an image of a ghost captured on one of these tablets. Yeah, that is something else profound. It's really quite profound.

00:55:03 And what that then tells us about ghosts and all of these other things, it's incredible. Do you want to just tell us a little bit more about that one particular image? Well, yeah, I mean that is something, it's written in about 500 BC or something and it belonged to an exorcist who was a specialist in getting rid of ghosts. And what they did is I mentioned briefly before, is sometimes they made a figure of the ghost or whatever and buried it with stuff that you would need sandwich box and comb and the radio and stuff like that, so to speak. And they would bury the figurine and that off it would go to the netherworld.

00:55:40 So the mechanism there is clear. But in this particular tablet there's a drawing of the ghost and of a woman. So there's writing and then there's a ruling across the clay tablet. Then there's an empty space and underneath that there's another ruling with more writing. And in this space he's drawn with a very delicate point, a picture of the ghost and of a woman.

00:56:04 And it's clear from the ritual that this is what happens, that in this case, the exorcist, I mean what must have happened literally is that there's a troublesome ghost in the family. That's obvious. So they try this, they try that, and then they call in a proper practitioner. And I think this is how it must have worked. A bit like Sherlock Holmes.

00:56:24 So the exorcist would say, okay, well, the first thing we have to do is to work out who this ghost is, who might it be, and by interrogation you can find out what time of day and whether anybody actually saw it. And perhaps by analysis and by behavior, it would become clear that it was, for example, this Great Uncle Henry so who's supposed to be in the underworld and been there for quite a long time. But the thing about Great Uncle Henry that everybody knew was that he always had to have a female partner. And so by discussion with the exorcist, he would establish this. So the conclusion would be that what we do is we make a little model of Uncle Henry and we make a model of a rather dishy lady.

00:57:09 And what we do is we bury them in a hole at sunset with various bits and pieces and she will take him down to the underworld and they will live happily ever after. This is the proceeding. And it might make you smile to think they could believe this kind of stuff, but actually it's not just a pretend belief. This was the analysis. He's back because of this matter.

00:57:32 So we'll give him someone like himself and they make these. And the drawings are very beautifully done. The woman has a straight back. She's striding forward with a close fitting cap and she's holding in her right hand a piece of rope. And behind her is a tall, skinny bloke with a long beard, straggly looking fellow who has his hands stretched out in front of him, tied together with the other end of the rope.

00:58:03 So this is the most staggering drawing because this is it. She is leading him off to the underworld. And you have to make the two images in this relationship tied like that. So she will take him off to the underworld and stay there. And the drawing is not just like a child's block caricature or something.

00:58:27 It's very beautifully done and both of the figures is very difficult to see until you see it. I mean, I had this tablet among my tablets to work on because I went through the whole collection looking for ghost literature. And I had this tablet because the other side is full of writing and very clear. So I knew it was an important source. And it was only when I got down to it and looked at it properly under the lab, I suddenly saw these drawings.

00:58:52 It was electrified. So what we actually have is a drawing of a ghost by a person for a practical, realistic purpose. And rather gratified to say that this tablet with this ghost is in the Guinness Book of Records as the world's oldest ghost picture. I'm rather proud of it because you wouldn't expect a cuneiform tablet to be in that August volume. But lo and behold, it is.

00:59:22 And it's absolutely fantastic thing. It's fantastic in itself as an artifact, but again, it's the association with something from before, real people, real people, and the person who put that image there, but also the people it was connected with, who had this need for it, who had this belief in it. And it's just making those connections that I just think are the really profound thing because it is connecting with our. Past, it is connecting with their past. And also, there's another point that I think if you got a professional in to do that, it's probably quite pricey.

01:00:06 I mean, they didn't have bank accounts and coinage, but there was a silver base to economy and all sorts of things could be arranged. But I think if you got someone to come in and do the whole lot, purify the house and this, this and this probably set you back quite a lot, so you wouldn't do it lightly. And I think the conclusion must be that it will be done when the ghost was really a pain in the neck, not just make you dumb, because also when they get really crossed, if they're really fed up and they don't get their offerings and things, they start making people ill and they can be really, really malicious. So I think this got to the stage where somebody in the family said, look, okay, this is enough. Get the guy in, I'll pay for it.

01:00:51 Something like that. I think it highlights the real need, the real urgency for it and the importance of it, the significance of it. And again, I think that comes back to what we've been saying throughout this was something so rooted in their belief system that money wasn't a factor here, it was a need for it and therefore it was done. And again, what does that reveal? What does that say?

01:01:16 That it was just so much part of experience, everyday life, it wasn't something. Shied away and ignored or that some people really believed in and others thought they were daft. I mean, that is the most important thing because I can state that knowing that ghosts exist and they could be troublesome was familiar to the boot boy and the king in the palace and everybody in between. It was one of the things that everybody took for granted. I think it's such an important matter that it's worth stressing again, and I read all these texts and there was nothing that did in any way make me doubt or contradict this idea that it was part of the way they saw the world and the way they saw life.

01:02:02 And so in other words, for them it was normal as opposed to paranormal. And again, all these other things that we've been talking about, communicating with the dead was something normal. It was something that people it wasn't laughed at. These were experiences, they were understood in a way that I think has been lost. And again, it's something that I think when we look back at history, if we look back at it with less critical thinking and oh, we're so much more evolved now, if we take that out, we can actually learn so much more.

01:02:36 If we're, like you've mentioned, a bit more sympathetic and understanding to see these. Commonalities, I agree with that. And also this bringing the dead up like that, it wasn't just the Mesopotamians who did it. I mean, remember in the Bible when King Saul was about to succumb to the Philistines and he went to this woman who lived on aim door on the mountain to call up the dead prophet Samuel. And she does, she calls him up and he comes up and talks to the king.

01:03:07 I mean, that was necromancy, pure and simple. And King Saul must have lived in about 1000 BC. Something like that. So you have there another window on the perfectly normal nature of the undertaking because Saul didn't like magicians and wizards and things, he had them driven out of the country. But when he was in the Extremists, he asked his people, where's that woman who does it?

01:03:35 And they took him there and he called up the prophet. The prophet came up from the underworld and he says to the king, it's an amazing story. I wrote about it in this book. I just thought it was such an amazing description. Samuel, the dead prophet, comes up and says.

01:03:50 Why you disturbed me. It's just incredible. It's like something in Shakespeare. It's got everything in it. And what is interesting, I spent about a week reading what Christian, Arab, Muslim and Jewish theologians had to say about this business, and they all couldn't bear the fact that it was described in the Bible that God's anointed called up one of God's prophets from the grave by necromantic ritual.

01:04:22 So there's all sorts of second guessing and excuses and maybe this and maybe that, maybe this and maybe that. But when you read the text, especially if you read it side by side with the Mesopotamian things, it shows you the prevailing understanding of how things were. And in Mesopotamia, nobody outlawed it, and Saul tried to outlaw it, but when it came for it, he still did it. So that is a kind of massive monument of reality about what was going on. It's not written there to perplex theologians or anything like that.

01:05:00 And the writing of it is so convincing. It is astonishing, that passage. I can't believe how amazing it is. Especially when the Prophet asked him what it's like. He was on watching something on television and the doorbell rang and he used to get off the sofa and he goes all the way upstairs, what the hell do you want?

01:05:20 It's like that. It's just amazing. Just amazing. Honestly, the book is just truly incredible. I mean, it's so insightful on so many different levels.

01:05:31 Just to understand more about the belief systems around burial, practice of death, dying and soul, the afterlife, as we've mentioned, just this intriguing, fascinating look at a culture that is so old, but yet has so much still to tell us, I think, today. And then to tie that in with this exploration of ghosts and the afterlife is just such an important like you mentioned. Like you said, it's the flag, the pin point going in the map type thing. Here's the starting point that we can look at and see this journey for what it is. And I really do think it's something that, if people read, will shift a lot of people's thinking, because it does change the narrative.

01:06:17 And so it's a book I very much recommend, and if people get the chance to visit the British Museum to see some of these in person, even better. Really? Exactly. Well said. Thank you so much for your entire time this evening.

01:06:35 It's honestly been incredible. I could pick your brains, I think, for ten years. I probably wouldn't scratch the surface in terms of what you know. You're very kind. No, but it's a marvelous subject and it's a pleasure to talk to you about it.

01:06:48 So be well. Thank you so much. Take care. Bye.