After Dark: Myths, Misdeeds & the Paranormal - Dark Side of Ancient Mesopotamia

Episode Date: June 12, 2025

A four thousand(ish) year old murder trial. A procession of the dead. Kings who believed they could escape the gods by dressing gardeners in royal clothes...then killing them. Welcome to the Dark Side of Ancient Mesopotamia! Guiding Maddy and Anthony through this most ancient and most fascinating civilisation is the incredible Professor Amanda Podany, author of 'Weavers, Scribes and Kings: A New History of the Ancient Near East'.Edited by Tomos Delarggy. Produced by Freddy Chick. Senior Producer is Charlotte Long.You can now watch After Dark on Youtube: www.youtube.com/@afterdarkhistoryhitSign up to History Hit for hundreds of hours of original documentaries, with a new release every week and ad-free podcasts. Sign up at https://www.historyhit.com/subscribe.  You can take part in our listener survey here.All music from Epidemic Sounds.

Hi, we're your hosts, Anthony Delaney and Maddie Pelling. And if you would like after dark myths, misdeeds and the paranormal ad free and get early access, sign up to History Hit. With a History Hit subscription, you can also watch hundreds of hours of original documentaries with top history presenters and enjoy a new release every week. Sign up now by visiting historyhit.com forward slash subscribe. We just wanted to take a moment to tell you about one of our favourite podcasts, Plant Murder. Now Plant Murder is not about how I kill every plant that ever comes into my house. Oh no, it is about the deadly intersection of plants and true crime. Yes, you heard that correctly.

And it is truly as fascinating as it sounds. Did a Roman Emperor really die from a mushroom? Why did the Victorians invent a deadly pear? And what happened during the last days of Edgar Allan Poe? We love the show so much because it mixes history and true crime, which is obviously something we thoroughly approve of here at After Dark. Not only this, but the sound design is so immersive it transports you back in time. Also, it's a true crime podcast with a difference. It looks at history through the world's most dangerous plants. And as a result, it makes us think more about humankind's

relationship to the natural world then and now. It is perfect if you like history and true crime, but also horticulture and plants. Search for plant murder wherever you listen to your podcasts, or visit RustyQuill.com for more information. You won't regret it. Welcome to After Dark, I'm Maddie. And I'm Anthony. Now, there is always a darker side to life. Death, murder and magic have been a universal part of the human condition for as far back as records

go, and today we are indeed going very far back indeed, all the way to ancient Mesopotamia. Here's Anthony to set the scene for us. 4,000 years ago, on top of a ziggurat that rises towering out of the flatland, a diviner is looking out at the starry night. His people have mapped out the heavens with the same figures we have today. The charging bull of Taurus, the scuttling crab of Cancer, the sheep of Aries, the Gemini twins. The moon rises through these constellations, shooting stars by sect them. The diviner watches for signs that will reveal the plans of the gods. But just as often, his gaze turns down to the city at his feet. A haphazard maze of streets and dead-end alleys, buildings piled on top of each other.

He sees the rooftops where children played while the sun was up, the same houses where lovers whisper now, the district of the brewers and the hot glare of the metalwork forges, the homes of scribes and priestesses. But something malevolent stirs in the night, too. The diviner can feel it. Trouble is afoot. Whether in the stars or in the streets below, he cannot tell. His heart quickens. Doubtless the dark plot will reveal itself soon. This is what he's here for, and why we too have come. This is after dark, and this is the dark history of ancient Mesopotamia. Oh boy, I'm excited for this episode. We have just done an episode on ancient Egypt with Dr Campbell Price, which I absolutely loved. And it turns out you listeners at home also

loved it. So if you are the last person on the planet not to listen to that episode, go back and do that now. We are heading further back in time. Potentially, we're going to find out where this timeline sits. Now we're going to ancient Mesopotamia as Anthony has set the scene. This is a place and an era that is often described as the cradle of civilization. And this is because it is the home of many firsts. The first place to have writing, to have cities, to have kings, and even to have laws. Despite being so very old though, the lives of the ancient Mesopotamians often feel relatable to us in some ways today, including of course the darker side of their lives and deaths. Our guest today is Amanda Padani, Professor of History at

California State Polytechnic and the author of Weavers, Scribes and Kings, A New History of the Ancient Near East. Amanda, welcome to After Dark. Thank you so much. It's a pleasure to be here. We're very excited to have you, not least because Anthony and I are both 18th centuryists by training and this is very new territory for us. So can you please set the scene for us? Let us know, where are we first of all in ancient Mesopotamia and when are we? Funny that you're 18th century people because I'm an 18th century person too, just BCE rather than CE. Same thing. Yes, exactly. 18th century. We can start in the 18th century, which is where I think a lot of the stories that I can tell you come from. The Mesopotamia by the 18th century BCE had cities,

it had had an urban civilization for 1500 years at least. It was a very well established place with a writing system. And funnily enough, they thought of themselves as having been at the end of hundreds of thousands of years of civilization. They didn't realize how new they were. I loved Anthony's description of the city. It's very accurate that the cities in what is now southern Iraq were bustling places. They were full of people who thought of themselves as being right in the most modern era, because of course they were. They were unaware that they were

in the ancient world because of course they had nothing to compare it to. And it was a place where there was extensive trade going on. If we look at the city of Ur, where I think we started with the the priest on the top of the ziggurat, it's right on the coast at that time of the gulf and there were ships coming in from all over the place from what was then called Dilmun but, but is now Bahrain, from as far away as the Indus Valley, bringing all kinds of what they thought of as exotic materials, including precious stones, or semi-precious stones, strictly speaking, and animals. And so there was a lot of international trade going on. There was a lot of construction going on all the time that the temples were being built. The ziggurat itself was often being sort of added to people who, as you say, specialized in all kinds of crafts and professions. There

was a literate class of priests. And the really great thing about Mesopotamia is we know all of this because so many of their records survive. And I think this is you talked about the Egypt episode you just did that in Egypt, of course, they wrote on papyrus and and on stone. Obviously, the big royal inscriptions were written on stone, but papyrus disintegrates unless it's in the desert. Whereas the Mesopotamians wrote on clay tablets, which survive incredibly well. And so we have so much more about daily life and about average people.

We know their names, we have tens of thousands of letters that they wrote, all of this kind of stuff. So we have this possibility to kind of really understand how they lived. And it makes it an exciting field, but also one where we know the good and the bad in terms of their culture. It's going to sound like such a basic question, but I think it's important to emphasize this,

Amanda, just for people who might not have a chronological idea of where we are. And I think this just highlights how remarkable these histories are and how remarkable some of the things, the legacies, the writing you're talking about, the fact that they can come to us. How many thousands of years ago are we talking here? When you get cities, it's about 6,000 years ago, about 4,000 BC. The civilisation, the writing part of the civilisation started around 3200, so 5200 years ago. And from that time on, we're really in history, strictly speaking, in that we can read their words. And then the use of the cuneiform writing system, which

is what they wrote in, ends right around the year one. I mean, you know, as a sort of an approximation. But the height of Mesopotamia in the period that I study, it mean, you know, as a sort of an approximation. So, but the height of Mesopotamia in the period that I study, it's so long ago, and it is so long lasting, that it actually survived longer than the period of time that has existed since the end of Mesopotamian civilization to the present. So more of human history is Mesopotamian than is post-Mesopotamian in terms of the number of years. There were more years in which the Mesopotamian civilization thrived than there have been years since its end. Oh, wow.

I have to sit with this for a minute. I mean, that's truly incredible. I have another way of looking at it though. Please tell us. Which is the opposite, which is that, you know, whenever I tell people what I studied, they go, oh my gosh, that's a long time ago. That's before the Greeks, before the Romans, before it's just so, so long ago. But if you think about it, it is actually a very short time, 5,000 years. The way I think of it is my son was born in 1996, which was the year that George Burns died, right? And George Burns happened to be a

hundred years old. So I think a hundred years, that's a long time. Now if you put a hundred years back-to-back to back, 100 year life spans back to back, you only have 50 of them and you get to the beginning of urban civilization. Which is not that long. 100 George Berns's, he was a famous American comedian, that's it. That's all of human culture, urban culture, I should say. Of course, there's a lot of culture long before that, but in terms of when people started living in cities. So we are kind of babies at this in a way, as well as it being a long time ago. Compared to the amount of time humans have been on the planet, it's not very much.

That has truly blown my mind, Amanda. Talk to me about these cities then. Obviously, they spring up in this very specific region, and they are, as I understand it, governed by their own king, and they also have their own god, is that right? So are they very distinct cultures that just happen to exist within this defined area of land? Are they linked in some way? You mentioned trade there, but it seems to me that they are very separate beings almost. It depends on the time you're talking about. The very beginnings of cities, yes, each city seems to have been not entirely independent, but certainly had its own government. A city-state really, not a city with the towns around it. And that's what's called the early dynastic period when there were first kings,

the pretty small kingdoms. But they all shared a common culture. They shared the same writing system. They shared the same two languages. There was one language called Akkadian, which was spoken in the north in a language unrelated to it called Sumerian that was largely spoken in the south. Lots of people were bilingual. It was not a sort of situation really of antagonism between two language groups. They interacted. Over time, it went back and forth between having these small kingdoms and having the region unified.

So there were a number of kings. The first one that we know of was Sargon of Akkad who came in and sort of swept in and conquered large regions of it and put it under a single government. And then they would go back to smaller kingdoms again. But throughout, there was a lot of contact, a lot of trade, a lot of communication between these kingdoms.

And they would have periods where they were allied, and there would be sort of leagues of cities, city states. And then there were times when they would be at war with one another. And then there were, as I say, times where these proto-empires were created. They weren't really empires initially in the sense that we can think of because they weren't very successful at it, but they would last for a while and they would unify the country and then it would split up again. So it's hard to say. I think the one thing to

recognize though is the culture really was shared. Even though each city had its own god, those gods were worshed by everybody. So, for example, the king of the gods, a god named Enlil, was believed to live in Nippur, which was a city in the sort of center of the country. But everybody believed in Enlil. It wasn't that they saw him as a false god or something. And in fact, most of the cities recognized him as the king of the gods, even though he wasn't their particular city god. So it was certainly a culture where, although they might identify, if you ask somebody, you know, who are you, where are you from, they might say, I'm so and so from Lagash, which is a city.

They did recognize themselves as sharing things in common, and they had a term for themselves, which was the black-headed ones. So they were people with black hair, and they recognized that as a sort of shared feature. Eventually, they also thought of that as all of humankind. We were all black-headed ones. But they didn't have a word for Mesopotamia, which is why we use the Greek term, but they did have a sense of shared culture. Talking about things that we share that's in even further proximity in some ways, but that kind of ignites the imagination is this idea of a good old ripping true crime case.

And we're going right to the heart of your particular area, I think here, Amanda, which is the 18th century BCE. And we have a case that survives and after dark we love these true crime cases and we hear about them an awful lot, but usually it's in our 18th century or the 19th century. And one of the things that we always take away from it is going, oh look, see, this isn't a new fascination we have with true crime. It was here in the 18th century and the 19th century too. And now, here you are coming in After Dark to tell us that even in 1800 BCE, they were

also absolutely transfixed with some of these stories of crime. Tell us about, there's a priest that's murdered by three men apparently. Yes, yes, no there is. Priest, his name is Lou Inanna. The reason we know about this is we have the court case that survived, recording the trial. And the fact that he was murdered by the three men seems to have never been an issue. Someone must have caught them in the act or something like this. So they're on trial. And the the king was initially called in, a king at that time named Orninoche. He was asked to judge the case because often homicides did go to the king. And he turned around and he said,

No, I'm sending it back to your city. This is, in fact, the city of Nippur that I was just mentioning, where that God Enlil was in residence. And the assembly of the city got together to make the decision about these three men. But the puzzle was, and this came out in the trial, was that apparently they had gone to the wife of Luwinana

and said, your husband has been killed. And she didn't say anything. She didn't scream. She didn't go running to the neighbors. She didn't say, oh my God, my husband's dead. They said she just closed her mouth and was silent. And this was very, very suspicious because everyone knows how you're supposed to behave when, you know, your husband is killed. And it is not that. And so they brought this to the assembly and six men stood up in the assembly and they said this is because she's behind it. This is you know she must have hired these men to kill her husband because what wife would not scream in agony when she found out that her husband had died. And then three other men stood up and said, what proof do you have basically? They were asking the... And you have the really interesting aspect of this assembly, which is

these men who were speaking were not elites. They were gardeners. And one was someone called a Mouchkhanem, who's a menial worker. And they were all men, but they were all considered eligible to speak up in the assembly and to voice their opinion. And so three other men seemed to have spoken in her defense saying, how can you accuse her when she didn't actually murder him? We know these three men murdered him. But then the text says the assembly of Nippur spoke. Now, obviously the assembly is not that everybody stood up and spoke in unison. Somebody spoke for the assembly and made the decision that she was in fact more guilty than the three men, that she had hired them as hitmen, and

all four of them were put to death. So it's a really, really interesting case because you can see the sort of workings of their judicial system in a really extraordinary case because we have a lot of cases of court cases where it's about who owns a field and did someone have the right to inherit something and what should be done about you know just just very prosaic stuff but when it comes to a murder it seems as though it was such a big deal that they decided that all the men of the city presumably could have a say in it and that that would give her presumably a fair trial. I don't know if it was a fair trial but it was it was what they did.

I have so many questions about this. My first question there, Amanda is, how do we know about this? I know earlier you mentioned the cuneiform tablets and we have spoken on this show before to Irvine Finkel, who is of course the curator at the British Museum responsible for those in that collection. Is that the way in which you came to this trial? Oh yes, no, it's preserved on a cuneiform tablet. Like many court cases, they were very litigious people, you know, they liked going to court and they would keep contracts ahead of time and they would consult the contracts in court if something came up. And then they would keep court records, especially of a case like this, so that if anybody has any future questions, they can go back and consult the records.

And presumably, this would also have been true in Greece and Rome and Egypt and so forth, but they don't survive. And we have them because clay is pretty indestructible. And so there's something like at least half a million cuneiform tablets that have survived. And I've seen numbers as high as a million that have been found. And of course, that means numbers as high as a million that have been found.

And of course, that means that there are plenty more that haven't been found. But it's so unbelievably well documented as a society that you find these remarkable stories that are ones that would never have been recorded had it not been for the particular documents surviving. MUSIC I'll have to keep my voice down because right now I'm between the actual bedsheets of some of history's most famous figures.

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Join me, Kate Lister, every Tuesday and Friday on Betwixt the Sheets to find out more. What What is remarkable is this level of litigation and how it has come down to this. And as you're saying, Amanda, maybe that would surprise a lot of listeners. But what's also surprising, I think, is the fact that this sits side by side with something that maybe people would have expected to find during the 18th century BCE. That is something called the river ordeal. Can you tell us a bit about that and tell us how that seemingly very formal litigious system works alongside something like the river ordeal? The river ordeal is when the gods got to decide. You have a situation where the king can decide. There's most situations in court cases the judges decided.

Occasionally you have a situation like the assembly deciding. But there are some cases for which it was just impossible to know. And then they would use they would bring in the gods because they didn't have any sort of separation between church and state, as we would say in the United States. They didn't even have a concept of what religion was. It was so intrinsic to their culture. They couldn't separate it. And the gods were absolutely real to them.

And therefore, if nobody else knew, presumably the gods knew who was at fault. And so the river ordeal was, especially it was a case if there was no documentary evidence and there were no witnesses. And that was often, for example, instances of adultery. So you don't call in witnesses to say, see, I'm not having an affair.

You know, I mean, that doesn't work. Or, yeah, I am having an affair. It should be a stupid idea to have witnesses for. So it was something that was just a he said, she said sort of situation. And that would mean that the gods knew if the woman was having an affair or not. And so what they would do is that they would take someone

to the river and they would have them dive into the river and if they survived they were innocent and if they died then the gods had taken care of the punishment. There are some cases interestingly where they were asked to swim across the river with a millstone which is a lot harder than just swimming across the river. I used to wonder about this a lot because anyone who could swim would have an advantage over anyone who could not swim, but apparently being able to swim was very, very rare that people didn't know how to swim for the most part. And that's true through most of history, weirdly enough, that swimming is only a modern sort of, the idea that most people could swim is a very modern thing. But yes, if you swam with a millstone, you'd have much less chance of making it across.

But there are cases, though, when they would say in the court case that the person was told to undergo the river ordeal, and they would confess rather than doing it. If you knew you were guilty, you knew the gods were going to kill you, and there was just a possibility you'd get a lesser penalty if you went ahead and confessed than if you dived into the river. And for them, that was just as practical and rational of a way of discovering the truth as if you had witnesses and contracts.

It wasn't sort of, oh, we're going to switch into superstition now. It was completely real. One other thing besides adultery was witchcraft, which they also believed in. And if you were accused of being a witch, again, that would be a reason to use the river ordeal because the gods would know, but you wouldn't have witnesses or contracts for witchcraft.

This society that you're painting, Amanda, I suppose, yes, as you say, the sort of intrinsicness of belief in all different forms to every aspect of life. And the fact that this creeps into law and is a way of distinguishing guilt and innocence, it's absolutely fascinating. You set up this world beautifully with this very verbose society, a society that is documenting itself constantly and very self-aware actually, which is fascinating. Let's talk about funeral rights and death practices now because I think you can always tell so much from a society from how they treat their dead, their relationship to death itself. I have in my notes here that I

have to ask you about the great death pit. So please, I'm at Enlighten Us. What is the great death pit? Yes, this was actually when I was a little kid, this was the thing that made me think this is a cool field to study. I was probably eight. There's a archaeologist named Sir Leonard Woolley, who in the 1920s was excavating at Ore. And he wrote a very lively account of his excavations in a way that was very compelling to the reading public. And it was it was the talk of the 1920s after Tutankhamun,

of course. But the discoveries in or were amazing because first he found thousands of graves in a graveyard, which honestly is cemeteries were not common later. People tended to bury the dead under their houses. But in the very early period, so around maybe between 3000 and 2600 or so, there was this big cemetery and people were buried with small goods, things that they would presumably take to the afterlife with them. But he found 16 tombs that were just extraordinary from around 2600, 2550, something like that.

These were tombs where there was clearly a person who had been buried who was important and he assumed that they were kings and queens and largely we've gone back to that. There was a phase where they thought, oh maybe they're not kings and queens, but almost certainly they were. And they had a built tomb and then around the built tomb he found in some cases dozens of additional skeletons of people who were dressed in fine clothing, they were carrying musical instruments, or they were soldiers carrying weapons, and they had clearly died at the time when the funeral took place. So that they were apparently either sacrificed or forced to commit suicide,

which was again, you know, if they were forced, then it was still, it was still sacrifice in order to serve the king or queen in the afterlife. And the amount of wealth found in these tombs is unlike anything that's been found in Mesopotamia since or before. It just extraordinary amounts of gold and lapis lazuli and carnelian and beautiful craftsmanship. One female attendant, one of these women of the dozens who were there, might be dressed in beads and gold headdress and she has silver ribbons in her hair and she's carrying a beautiful musical instrument. And that would be true of dozens of them. And the Great Death Pit, which he definitely was fascinated by,

seemed to have no king or queen, just a whole lot of dead people. There's 74 of them in it, five or six men and all the rest were women. And the five or six men seemed to have been soldiers lined up at sort of the entrance. And the women were all in four lines. They were all apparently lying. By the time they were found, of course, they were lying down, but perhaps initially they were seated in four lines and there was a beautiful harp and they were other musical instruments as well. And just what was going on here? More recently they've identified one person in the death pit as probably being a priestess, probably maybe not a queen, but as much more, the goods she was carrying were more refined and beautiful,

and that it may have been her tomb, and she might have been the high priestess of the moon god, because that was a position at Oor that was a very important position, separate from the king and queen. But these tombs are extraordinary. What they found more recently, because Woolley thought that they all took poison,

and they just sat down and died, with their consent. But a couple of studies more recently have looked at the skulls and they found that actually they were bashed in the head. At least the ones that they've looked at seem to have been murdered. And then, weirdly enough, it seems as though perhaps the killing of the attendants took place first and then they preserved the bodies and dressed them and made it like a tableau in the tomb, as if it was sort of preparing them to go off to the afterlife with the king or queen in style. But taking what were already dead bodies and kind of like making a tableau with them, which is very weird. Well, that is the stuff of nightmares, isn't it? Just surrounding yourself with post-life animated dead bodies. Well

that'll keep you awake. In great after dark tradition we have an image here. Now this is from the London Illustrated News in 1928. Maddie I'm going to ask you to bring in all your incredible art historical skills that I do not possess and describe. Now this is a recreation but it relates to what Amanda's just been describing. So Maddie, give us a rundown of what we're seeing in this and we'll share this on socials as well. Yes, this is an artistic sort of representation of what this tomb would look like. We have several rows at the left-hand side of the image of what looked to be men, possibly soldiers. They look like they're wearing what could

be a helmet of some kind and these very long cloaks. Behind them is a row of oxen and they are pulling carts, chariots maybe, and inside each of the chariots there's at least one male figure stood up. All around there are maybe servants, extra figures. At the back is there some kind of tent possibly? I'm not sure there's some sort of structure going on there. But I mean, Amanda, this is incredibly... What strikes me about it and about everything you've said so far actually is just the strange combination I suppose in this culture and this moment in history of orderliness, the recording of everything, the writing down of everything, this very structured way of dealing with the dead

when it comes to elite dead, at least, but also the absolute brutality and from our modern perspective, the horror really of this. Do you think that's a fair sort of assessment of, I don't want to make a sweeping statement, but of ancient Mesopotamia, that there is this kind of sites that do seem earlier sites that seem to have some sort of human sacrifice but it certainly didn't last into the height of Mesopotamian civilization which is also interesting because the same was true in Egypt. Very early Egyptian tombs had human sacrifices and later they didn't and they would replace them with little models you know and in China the same, I mean, completely unconnected cultures where you

have early kings sacrificing attendants in their tombs and then later, you know, the Terracotta army is exactly an example of why you didn't need human sacrifices anymore because you had these things that would spring to life as human beings in the afterlife. I think the same thing's going on here. I think initially these powerful kings and queens, and the queens had just as much wealth as the kings did. This was sort of equality and death there. But it must've been a singularly unpopular thing to do. I mean, you can imagine that the population

might have felt really the kings died and we're going to kill off dozens of people again, you know, that you're going to take my kid or you're going to take my wife or my husband to go off to the afterlife. I mean, we don't have records to prove that. It's just a sort of instinctive feeling that this wouldn't have been a way to endear yourself to the population if you knew that every time the king died, a whole bunch of people were going to die. Was there a belief, Mandir, in the divinity of the king? Because you spoke earlier about this kind of blending of again, rationality and belief. And I'm wondering if the people who go into this

tomb, do we have evidence that any of them went willingly, that they simply believed that was their duty that the king had died and therefore they wanted to go with him? Wish we knew. It was really before they were writing things that would have told us. By 2600 there were a few very, very rudimentary royal inscriptions, but mostly they only wrote administrative texts. And that's lists of beer and barley and sheep and things, which is fascinating, but doesn't tell us what they thought about the afterlife. And later they clearly didn't practice this, and therefore we don't have an account of why they would have done it because it was gone, it didn't happen. They did though believe that people lived on after death, but what they described was a place that was not heaven or hell, it was just

a dark place everyone went to. Unlike the Egyptians who believed that you got a reward for a good life by going to this, you know, glorious Egypt but better place, and not throughout Egyptian history, but of course later when the afterlife gets democratized in Egypt you get that. In Mesopotamia there's no sign that they actually thought the afterlife was particularly pleasant ever. It was dark, the food was bad, you didn't get to see your relatives anymore, you didn't see the sunshine, but you lived on. And the more sons you had, the better afterlife you had. So there was one record that said,

you know, the man with six sons has a better afterlife than the man with two sons or whatever. But that's probably because there were more people remembering you and invoking your name. When it comes to whether the kings were divine, my instant reaction is to say no. Unlike in Egypt, they didn't refer to the kings as gods. But there is this interesting thing that I'm not sure that the people would have been 100% clear on that. So the kings knew that they weren't divine and they knew they were going to an afterlife and preferably, you know, a nice afterlife. But to judge from the fact they took lots of stuff with them, I think they thought they could take stuff with them and that that would make their life a little bit easier. But they had statues made of the kings that were set up in temples

and that received offerings, as did the statues of the gods received offerings in temples. And I think it may have been a vaguer concept for the average person on the street as to whether their king was in fact a god. Strictly speaking, no, they weren't, but I think it may have been a vaguer concept for the average person on the street as to whether their king was in fact a god. Strictly speaking, no they weren't, but I think they were powerful enough and they received the same kind of treatment in some cases. Not always, but in some cases, that there was probably a little bit of a fuzzy sense of that in people's minds. But going back, Maddie, to your point about brutality versus order, they definitely, for most of Mesopotamian history, did not like brutality and it was something that they liked to order. Even though sometimes you read laws

that were written in Mesopotamia and there's a whole lot of death penalties, when you look at these court cases, they were rarely ever enacted. They would tend to impose a fine on someone. That was the most common thing. You would be fined for something. And even things that were listed as death penalty crimes in the laws, they tended not to like doing that. And it's only very late in Mesopotamia, and very late in my mind, because I do the second millennium BC, but not late for people who do the first millennium BC, where you get things like the Assyrians flaying people alive and impaling people on stakes and things like that. That is not something that had two thousands of years of history behind it. That was sort of an innovation in the first millennium.

Amanda, one of the things that has always struck me about this particular ritual of death in this time period is this idea of burying, you talked about the average Mesopotamian there, the idea of burying the average Mesopotamian, not with all this fanfare, not with all these additional people, but under or near your house. And that for me, and that's obviously because it's a very modern, very Western idea of how we deal with our dead, but that for me always feels very interesting to keep your dead that close and to almost have them as a foundational part of the living. Talk to me a little bit more about that process and what they thought and understood that was happening when they laid people to rest in that way.

Again, I wish they wrote more about it because that would give us many more hints. They've surprisingly reticent in terms of talking about the process of why they did what they did. But yes, they buried people under the house. They often had a built tomb under the family shrine in the house. They would put generations of people into the tomb and obviously the bodies would decompose and they would sometimes move the bones aside and put the new person in. But it was a way of keeping family close, I think. It was respect rather than... I don't think they would have thought of it as macabre in the way that we do it. It seems to have been so accepted. But it

didn't mean that your house was your house for generations because if you sell that house, you are selling your tomb with your ancestors in it. And so we see a lot of families staying in the same place generation after generation and you can see it because they leave their documents in the house. Often they're just trash at some point but you have cuneiform tablets you know swept aside or built into the walls or whatever and you often see generations of the same family the documents over generations in that same house and if two sons inherit then they just put a wall down the middle and they each get half the house. But the extent to which we moderns tend to move houses and sell and buy houses would have been strange to them. They tended to be very rooted to the place where they felt their ancestors were. I'll have to keep my voice down because right now I'm between the actual bedsheets of some

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wherever you get your podcasts. Right, time to slide out of here and avoid the bedpan. Yes, when we began this conversation, I was thinking, you know, that this is the first time that cities emerge in human civilization, certainly, you know, as we would we would recognize them. But actually, we think of the cityscape today as this very transient thing and that people are often passing through it. They are living in these unstable ways, they're renting, they're moving around, we have a fluctuating house market, all of that. But actually, there's a sense of meaning and place to these people that's completely different to how we understand it really, and that the dead play such a part in that. It's so interesting.

And I want to move us on to think a little bit more about kings because there's something in Mesopotamia called a substitute king and I am obsessed with this idea because I think you've painted so far a sort of quite hierarchical society, certainly in terms of the position of women as being secondary citizens in a lot of situations, particularly legal situations. And we know that this society is built around having a king in each city. What then is a substitute king? Yes, a bit about women because I'm fascinated with women. Yes, they were, it was a patriarchal society and they were secondary, but they had surprising rights when you think about

the ancient world. They could represent themselves in court, they could sue someone, take them to court, they could be witnesses to contracts, they could own land, they could pass their dowries down to their children, they could go out in public, they didn't need chaperones. For most of Mesopotamian history, they had surprising numbers of rights. They certainly didn't have the same as men did, but they weren't as oppressed as one might sort of immediately think. And that's, you see that also with those priestesses and queens who were buried with such incredible style, that they were powerful women. And that was true throughout. The women who were priestesses and queens really were powerful women. And that was true throughout. Women who were priestesses in Queens really were powerful women. The first instance we know of a substitute king in my era, in a little bit before it, about 19th century

BC, where there was a king named Ere Imiti, and he was king of a place called Isim, and there was some sort of omen. And as you talked about right from the beginning, they did believe that the gods told them what was going to happen in the future through celestial events, you know, standing on that ziggurat looking at the night sky. And something happened, probably an eclipse of the moon, which they thought was really terrifying. And if you think about it, you know how the moon turns red during an eclipse? It's really scary looking. It's like, why is the moon suddenly red if you don't understand the science behind it? So whatever happened, Irimiti was told by his diviners that he was going to die. And he decided, and he might have been the first to think of this, well, the king has to die, but it didn't use my name, right? You know, if the king is going to die, then maybe I won't be king for a while. And so he appointed a man named Enlilbani,

who was described as a gardener and made him king and said, okay, I'm stepping down. Enlilbani is now king. So Enlilbani takes over the kingship and he must have known that this was like, really? Are you serious? Presumably he knew he was going to die. And that must have been the plan. Kill Enlilbani, Eireimeti can come back to the throne and everything will be fine. While this was going on, while Enlil Barney was the fake king, Eire Imeti died. So the actual king apparently choked on his porridge or something. He died while eating. And apparently the conclusion was, well, he didn't fool the gods, the king did die, but Enlil Barney is now king. And so the gardener then remained king for the rest of his life. So he was the the founder of a, you know, new little dynasty. So that's the first example.

But the more famous examples come from the seventh century. So this is seventh century BC, when a king named Esarhaddon was king of Assyria, and he was king not just of a small kingdom, he was king of the Assyrian Empire, which was enormous. It encompassed vast amounts of the Middle East now, what is now the Middle East, and he even extended it to Egypt. So he was a powerful, powerful king. But he was absolutely paranoid about his own safety. He was someone who was constantly asking diviners,

you know, am I safe? Is someone threatening to kill me? Am I going to be killed by disease? He was really worried. And he was a guy who was often sick too. He had this preoccupation with substitute kings four times in his reign. And he didn't have that long of a reign. He stepped aside and he had a substitute king take his place. And then the substitute king would rule for a hundred days. Then he would be killed, have a full proper burial, and then Esarhaddon would come back to the throne.

The gods had been fooled and he could then rule again. And he did in fact die naturally. He didn't die of an assassination as he so feared. But the crazy thing about these substitute kings is that everybody had to act as though it was real. Otherwise the gods would know you were trying to fool them, right? So he had a really close advisor, a man named Adar Chuma Utsor, who was his physician.

He was also his exorcist in that he had to get rid of the demons that troubled Esarhaddon. And he was also the substitute king wrangler. He was the person who would get the substitute king completely fitted out. He would, you know, whoever this person was, farmer or someone, you know, someone who was clearly not an official, they would make sure he had the jewels of a king, that he would have the gowns of a king. And this is all described in the letters that pass between the king and his official. And then they would even make a statue of this fake king so that, and the statue would have its own garments and so forth.

Everyone had to say, yes, this is our king. And while Esarhaddon was off the throne, he would write letters to his officials and he would say to so-and-so, thus speaks the gardener or thus speaks the farmer. He wouldn't even use his own name because the gods would catch on. He would just use his pseudonym of the farmer. He would still be suggesting ways of running the country. But it was all this subterfuge to try and convince the gods to kill the king, but just not the real king, kill the fake one. And if you don't do it, then we'll do it for you, and the omen will be taken care of. So these poor guys, you know, the substitute kings, I assume they knew, you know, they must have. But for 100 days, they lived this

incredible life as king, and then they were put to death. Since we've been doing this podcast, I am intrigued by this idea of surety and belief systems that we have lost. And that it's, I think that's one of the most difficult things to draw a line between the past and the present, that the absolute belief with which people have invested their lives and their understanding of the world around them into something that we can't quite relate to today. But one of the things that has fascinated me talking to so many experts over the last kind of year and a half, two years, is this idea of disbelief.

And so I'm going to ask you a question of which I think is probably going to be impossible to answer, but I'll ask it anyway because I'm intrigued. Do we have any idea from this time period that people just weren't buying into any of this? That the idea of the gods was slightly scoffed at or that this kind of all-seeing eye or not quite all-seeing eye actually, because you could fool them, was just all in order to maintain control and whatever else. Do we have any idea of Mesopotamian disbelief? DL. Weirdly, no. And it's so striking actually that that's true. Because you would think,

yeah, that there's somebody going, yeah, I don't believe this stuff. The way that I think we can understand it is that they had no other explanation. If you've grown up your entire life from babyhood, when the sun rises, they say, oh, there's the sun god rising. When the storm comes, it's, oh, my goodness, the storm god is angry today. You don't have a way of rejecting it. Do you see what I mean? It's not as though it was that your parents were saying, this is religion and this is what we believe. It's like you have a dog, you have the sun god. You don't turn around and say, I don't believe in this dog.

This dog isn't real. I think for them, it was so wound up with everything that they understood that they didn't have a way of separating it out and saying, and they also had no science in the way that we understand science. They could not explain a storm unless it was a god. How do you explain the Sun moving across the sky unless it's a god? How do you explain the movements of the planets among the stars unless they're messages from the gods? The gods were simply another form

of animate living being that just didn't die. But the fact that the dog moves and jumps up and barks at you shows that it's animate. The fact that the sun moves shows that it's animate. It really does seem to be something where atheism hadn't developed. And this is in part, I think, because they hadn't been exposed

to any other belief systems. Every belief system they encountered had gods. You go to Egypt, they have gods too. You don't go, oh, you have false gods. Not at all. They were like, oh, you also worship the sun, so do we. You also worship the moon, so do we. You know, there's so much in common

that the fact that they had different names for them didn't bother them at all. It was just, these are the same gods. And then even in Roman times, you know, you go to Egypt and you discover they have Isis and Isis, a very cool goddess, let's bring her in. You know, there's a sense of the supernatural world is so huge, the divine world is so huge that you couldn't possibly know it all. And so when new things show up from encountering other cultures, it's not a threat to your

religion. It's a way of sort of understanding that the religion is bigger and more interesting than you knew. And I think it's so hard for us to understand because that is so not how we think, you know? We are such skeptics in the modern world. And we also know about the world's religions and we know that they differ and we know that there are absolutely important faiths that people have that they feel strongly about, but that they are separate from one another. And they didn't have that. I mean, I would be happy to be proved wrong if one found a document written by a Mesopotamian scribe going, you know, I don't think Shamash is real. That would be fascinating. But for the moment, we have them

doubt themselves. There's a wonderful text called L'Udl-e-Bal-Nemeki, which means, may I, let me praise the Lord of wisdom, in which a man, everything goes wrong for him. He just has the worst life and he's sick and he's dying and he describes sort of lying in his own excrement. It's really nasty stuff. I mean, he gets really gruesome detail about his diseases and so forth, and he's constantly asking the gods, why me? I am such a good person. I do all the right rituals. I do, I say all the right prayers. I'm a good person. Why is this happening to me? And then he has a dream in which the God appears to him and releases him from it. And once the dream comes, he gets well. And then he writes this poem, supposedly expressing his appreciation to the gods. But in that whole poem, he never goes, you know, I don't believe in these gods. If they were there,

they'd be helping me. He just keeps on praying harder and harder and harder. And then finally the gods pull through for him. But yeah, it is a really striking thing that one would think from our perspective that there would be someone doubting it it all and not yet, as far as I know. Amanda, this has been the most fascinating and unexpected exploration of this history, this region. I didn't have much of an idea going into this and I feel like I've stepped into some of those houses and these cities that you're speaking about and certainly into those tombs for better or worse and I will be having nightmares tonight about those. It's so fascinating the completely different mindset that these human beings have

that we have certain fundamental things in common with them, life, death, having to deal with the dead, having some kind of religion, having law, having societal structure. But the way that they understand the world around them is so very different from us. And it's so refreshing to spend time in this this moment in history. It's been absolutely fascinating. So thank you so much. And thank you for listening along at home. If you've enjoyed this, then please do check out the ancients with Tristan Hughes for a bottomless dive into the ancient past. They recently did a mini series on the fall of Rome that everyone is raving about so do go and check that out. If you've got suggestions for episode topics for After Dark,

including other ancient topics, please get in touch with us via email at afterDoc at HistoryHit.com. We just wanted to take a moment to tell you about one of our favourite podcasts, Plant Murder. Now Plant Murder is not about how I kill every plant that ever comes into my house. Oh no, it is about the deadly intersection of plants and true crime. Yes, you heard that correctly. And it is truly as fascinating as it sounds. Did a Roman Emperor really die from a mushroom? Why did the Victorians invent a deadly pear? And what happened during the last days of Edgar Allan Poe? We love the show so much because it mixes history and true crime, which is obviously

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