Mesopotamian ghostbusting with Irving Finkel I Curator's Corner + #CuratorsCorner

Would you like to ascend the stairs? Yes, of course. I would like to see a ghost. I've never seen one. It's very annoying to me. When a person died in Mesopotamia, as far as we understand it, they had to be laid in the ground with a kind of ritual so they were jolly well locked in and wouldn't come back and cause trouble. Somebody who died on the battlefield or overseas never seen again or died in childbirth, who was never properly laid to rest, would come back and visit the living in the world. And there's a very great deal of evidence all about this. And on the whole, we can deduce one or two interesting facts. The first thing is that everybody in Mesopotamia, as far as I understand it, believed in ghosts. So you've never had a conversation with someone saying, oh, you know, I was talking to my neighbour and she said she saw a ghost in the laundry and she must be stupid to believe all that kind of stuff. Everybody knows that there aren't ghosts and all that. That didn't happen in Mesopotamia. It was a day-to-day thing that everybody took for granted. But also they weren't on the whole frightened of them, but rather sympathetic, because they thought they were troubled and they couldn't rest and they needed to be looked after. So there was a whole school of specialist magic, which was to appease ghosts and to send them back where they belong without any further trouble. So we have in the British Museum a rather splendid tablet of this kind with a drawing on it where you can really see what happens, because there is a rather porkly aunt-like woman shown in profile on this tablet, walking to the right. And she, I think, is the ghost. It's probably somebody's great aunt. And she was the trouble. So what they decided she needed, this ghost, was a young lover. So the exorcist makes a model of this porkly lady and a model of a lithe, bearded, of course, energetic and sexy lover. The effigies, the clay models of them, are buried in a pit together with other things they might need and covered over. I think it's probably done at dawn or something like that. They're buried safely in this pit. And the idea was that they would then subside down into the underworld and not come back and be troublesome. And in the drawing, which is depicted on the clay, this woman is pulling him along on a lead. So there's no chance of him escaping. There was also a kind of ghost who was very dangerous. And I think these are ones who probably were nasty people when they were alive, because there are human beings who go around causing trouble for everybody else for no reason whatsoever, kind of gratuitous schmucks. And I imagine that really malevolent ghosts in Mesopotamia had something to do with that idea. They weren't nice in the first place. So they can cause a lot of trouble. And they had a kind of habit of sliding in through the ear when someone was asleep and driving them mad, upsetting their psychological state and causing other difficulties. And it's clear that people thought that migraine, they had a word for migraine, it wasn't just headache, a really, really terrible headache, was caused by this entity going in through the ear, which had to be driven out. And one of the other tablets shows two other things which an exorcist has to make. And these are very remarkable. They're drawn in great detail on the tablet. And you will see that there is a figure who looks like a king sitting on a throne holding the appurtenances of royalty with a royal cap on. And his name is written down the side of the drawing. And he's a man called Abaknanaia. And we don't know who he was, but he must have been one of those sages from remote times who was very intelligent. And next to him, drawn next to him, is his court vizier, who is shown on a pole, standing like this, sitting, squatting on top of a pole like this with his hands out in both directions, looking straight at the camera. Very interesting figure. And this complicated ritual where we have these drawings, worked like this, because you made this king, put him at the head of the bed, and he was so really powerful spiritually that no trouble would ever come near. And also, when you made the vizier, it was on this pole, and you flicked it like this, and it went round. And the fluttering of it obviously disturbed anything which was floating around in the atmosphere. And it will be driven away rather like a scarecrow in a cornfield. This is obviously not a kind of thing that will be available in villages and small towns. This is the top of the exorcist profession, where you call in the best person, the wisest person, with the greatest amount of knowledge, who then, this is a case for this very special ritual, which will cost rather a lot of silver, because we have to do all these things, and someone has to be, and all that kind of stuff. So, it's rather interesting to have a window on the top level of this kind of idea, and how to deal with it with physical apparatus. Because you can imagine, farmers and people who worked on the estates in the countryside, and boatmen, and all the normal people in the world, they didn't have anything to do with that. They probably didn't have time to see ghosts, or if they did, they probably just waved at them. So, we have two ends of a spectrum, and almost all the writing about these things is for what Tom Lehrer, that brilliant and intelligent person, once described as the diseases of the rich.