The oldest ghost depiction uncovered at the British Museum

My name is Dr Irving Finkel and I'm a senior curator in the British Museum in the Department of the Middle East

And among the cuneiform tablets, which are something like 130,000 pieces altogether made of clay

one of them has on it the oldest picture of a ghost as far as we know ever recovered from archaeology

Well, this is the cuneiform tablet in question and it's made of clay

which was the natural writing material used by the Sumerians and the Babylonians in ancient Mesopotamia

for more than 3,000 years long before paper was invented or anything with which the modern world is familiar

And they used this to take messages which were pressed into the surface of the clay with a special writing stick

And this is among them the jewel in the crown because it has on it the oldest depiction of a ghost which has been recovered through archaeology

Well, this piece of clay is a direct window into what these ancient people all that time ago in ancient Iraq thought and believed about ghosts

They were just part of life. And when people died, they were buried

And if everything went well, they went down to the underworld and they stayed there

And that is the default position. But sometimes it happened for more than one reason that a ghost who was supposed to be down there came back

And the Babylonian view of it was that when a ghost comes back and there were lots and lots of different reasons

what they were dealing with is a ghost who was unhappy. If you had a ghost and it wouldn go away and the obvious things that you did didn get rid of it then you have to get professional help And there were exorcists and diviners people in the Babylonian culture

for whom this was their daily work. And part of it was this, if someone had a troublesome ghost

they would go and consult one of these authorities. Now, very commonly the idea was, if you knew who the ghost was

if you pinned it down, what you would do is to make

a little model out of clay of the person, give them some identifying figures

and then they would be subjected to a magical spell and perhaps buried somewhere where they would go back to the underworld

in a way that they'd been appeased and that their source of distress had been finished

and the sacrifices they're supposed to get of food and water were still regularly going to be given

This tablet is something else because the man who wrote it in about the 4th century BC

300 and something in Babylon, who was one of these professional exorcists, not only did he write

down the description of the figurine and the spell that you were supposed to recite and what

you were supposed to do with it, but he actually made in the surface of the clay with a very fine

point drawings, drawings of two figures that had to be made by some young exorcist who would

be using this as a reference work in the future. So what we have here is a unique picture

because the practice of figurine making is well known and in fact it's not a Babylonian thing

exclusively. There are many cultures who do that kind of thing but to make a proper drawing

is quite extraordinary