Dan Snow's History Hit - Ghost Stories: The History

Episode Date: October 30, 2021

Ghosts have inspired, fascinated and frightened us for centuries. The belief in the existence of an afterlife, as well as manifestations of the spirits of the dead, is widespread, dating all the way back to pre-literate cultures. Whether we personally ‘believe’ in them or not, we have an awareness of ghosts and the mythologies surrounding them.Dr Irving Finkel, a curator at the British Museum, has embarked on an ancient ghost hunt, scouring to unlock the secrets of the Sumerians, Babylonians and Assyrians to breathe new life into the first ghost stories ever written. Responsible for the world's largest collection of cuneiform clay tablets, the oldest known form of writing which dates back to 3400BC, Irving gives us a full picture of the ancient Mesopotamian ghost experience. As one of only a handful of people left in the world that can read this ancient language, Irving has uncovered an extraordinarily rich seam of ancient spirit wisdom which has remained hidden for nearly 4000 years.Author of the upcoming The First Ghosts, Irving joins Dan to explore what ghosts are, why the idea of them remains so powerful despite the lack of concrete evidence and how a belief in ghosts emerges as a key feature of humanity from its beginning.

Hi everybody, welcome to Dan Snow's History Hit. There are times in my career, especially on this podcast, where I have to pinch myself, that I actually can't quite believe I'm doing this. And this episode is one of those. I was lucky enough to talk to the very brilliant Dr Irving Finkel, no one ever forgets him. If you were a casting director and you wanted to find, say, an expert, a curator at the British Museum who knows more than anybody about ancient Assyria, who spends their time piecing together tablets, cuneiform, early forms of writing to learn more about that long-dead civilisation, but one that shaped so much of subsequent human history. Picture that person in your head. You are picturing Dr. Irving Finkel. He looks every inch.

The brilliant, the eccentric, the knowledgeable, the friendly, the kind, the hugely intelligent and wise ancient Assyrian expert that you've got currently in your head right now. He's an absolute legend. I want to talk to him on the podcast. And he said, let's talk about ghosts. Let's talk about the first ghosts that appear on the human record. And that means the ancient Assyrians writing down their thoughts about ghosts, what to do about them, what form they take, how to get rid of them, how to placate them. And I said, Dr. Irving Finkel, you're the boss. Let's talk about ghosts.

So we did. We talked about ghosts, and you're about to hear that conversation. It was, as you would hope, extraordinary. If you want to see other extraordinary history content, and listen to it, you can do so at History Hit TV. It's like Netflix for history, folks. I may have told you about this before. I can't remember. You go to historyhit.tv, historyhit.tv. You sign up for a small subscription, and then you're part of a revolution, which is making proper history shows and podcasts for proper history fans and listeners like you.

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You send it, that hard-to-buy-for history fan in your family, sorted. That Christmas tick box done finish. No heavy good vehicle drivers required for that, so don't worry about it. So head over to history.tv and get 30 days free if you subscribe today. But in the meantime, here's Dr Irving Finkel talking about ghosts in ancient Assyria. Enjoy. Irving, thank you very much for coming on this podcast. A pleasure. Very exciting for me. Now, I did not know that ghosts were as old as time itself.

Tell me when the first ghosts were. Well, this is a very contentious matter, and no one, as far as I know, has ever braved it and tilted it at the windmill in order to establish it. So this is my idea. The book is called The First Ghosts, which is about the ghosts of ancient Mesopotamia, because there we have written evidence from at least, well, 2500 BC onwards. So we have real writing, real ideas, and that's certain. But the ghosts never began with the Sumerians or the Babylonians. And in my opinion, they are in fact an attribute of Homo sapiens. Now, look, the thing is, this is a very difficult matter. But I discovered in doing the work for this book that there are Neanderthal burials as well as Homo sapiens burials.

So around the period 50,000, 40,000 BC, when Neanderthals and the Homo sapiens were in the same kind of terrain and apparently intermarried and played bridge together, it is absolutely astonishing that there are laid out graves with Neanderthal bodies, sometimes with bits in, not big bits, not television sets, but things. And it is my contention that in archaeology, when you have a burial with any kind of object in it, however modest, the implication is that once the body has rotted away and disappeared, some other thing goes somewhere else. So a necklace or a spade or a dagger or something will be needed in the future so the implication

of burying things with the body is not a woolly thing i think it means the afterlife so this is my pet and dangerous theory that the minute you have burial with an afterlife in your mind as a possibility or as a probability if the invisible thing can go somewhere, then it can also come back. So I think that the conception of the afterlife and the ghost, the returning revenant ghosts, are bound together and have accompanied human beings since they were first homo sapiens. That's why all over the world people believe in ghosts. Even if they say they don't, they really do. the world people believe in ghosts even if they say they don't they really do all cultures have accounts which are very similar directly comparable and share the same innate beliefs which is this that when a person is dead they are buried they go somewhere right everyone knows that but the

thing is it's an almost human universal the conception that if a person died under gruesome circumstances they died in childbirth they were run over by a tractor they're very unhappy almost human universal, the conception that if a person died under gruesome circumstances, they died in childbirth, they were run over by a tractor, they're very unhappy. When they're down there and buried, the spirit can't rest and it comes back and it hangs around where it was before and pulls people's hair and says, you've got to do something, you've got to do something. And this sort of idea is, in my opinion, a component of humanity. It is really deep fixed. That's a beautiful thing.

How do we know that it's universal? Where do we start learning about ghosts? How are they described in the earliest days of, well, art, imagery or writing? Well, the thing is this, the Mesopotamian sources I work on in the British Museum, these cuneiform tablets we have many thousands of them and they are to do with among other things magic and medicine and disease and ghosts they're a big component of the problems facing human beings and the specialists who dealt with them so from the middle of the third millennium as it were if we're outside with

our microscope we are martian anthropologists we can oh, by 2600 BC, at the very minimum, ghosts existed in Mesopotamia. But the thing is this, the shared nature of humanity is such that when you start to poke around, the written cultures of the world are full of accounts of ghosts. Most of them are dismissed by scientists, of course, because they're just hearsay but they're all sorts of narratives and all over the world in villages and small towns and the countryside where people don't live in the middle of a massive urban conglomeration at london beliefs like this go unchallenged so i tell you the interesting truth i believe as far as i can see this is a natural human belief system which where it's allowed to continue without sarcasm religious criticism science and all that which makes a ridicule of it all over the world people still maintain this basic belief system and you can

talk to people from cultures anywhere you like and And if you say to them, you know, I think ghosts, and my colleagues think I'm a lunatic. Well, they'll say, well, let me tell you something. I saw my aunt the other day in the garden in the vegetable patch looking for a piece of rhubarb. And this is a kind of universal thing. People live with the reality of it. And when you take the broad view all the way back as far as we can,

the modern world in which people laugh at this or they won't talk about it and they won't wear it on their sleeve and they suppress it is, so to speak, unnatural. How do people talk about them? Do people talk about seeing them? Are people speculating about their origins? In your wonderful cuneiform, how are they referred to? When you talk about ghosts now, there are all sorts of stories and Victorian things and things on television, things in the newspaper, and people know what ghosts are like in that kind of world. And they clank along in hotel rooms and that's that. But

the thing is, when you look into the history of ghosts, if you do in a library board, people think they start in the Middle Ages or maybe a bit earlier, but the Greeks and the Romans and the Babylonians had a very, very similar belief system. What they believed was, or what they record as happening, is that ghosts come and they annoy them. And they start off by being annoying. They make you jump. Sometimes they get obsessive. Sometimes they make you ill. Sometimes they persecute you. And the thing is, very often the ghosts can be recognized as being a member of the family or something like that, because they are in human form and they seem to wear clothes in the text. But they're not diaphanous exactly, but they're not solid.

And people sort of take for granted that one of the things that can happen to you is you see a ghost. So what they did is they had all sorts of procedures for getting rid of them. Sometimes a very simple amulet saying, go away, ghost, leave me alone. procedures for getting rid of them. Sometimes a very simple amulet saying, go away, ghost, leave me alone. And if that didn't work, you got in a professional exorcist who might make a magic circle with recitations and offerings and spells and drive this thing away. So it existed as a kind or part of everyday life in ancient Mesopotamia. As far as I can understand it, from the king down to a beggar in the street, everybody took for granted the fact that ghosts came back and that people saw them. And therefore, it's up there with affection for children, food, sex,

as one of our most universal characteristics. Yes, well, I think it's a human basic matter that nobody in the world, wherever you went to talk about this would step back from you and say what are you talking about they would have in their own lives or their own family memory or their own awareness the same idea that this is what happens in the real world anyway i've done my best to argue for this but you see the thing is i have to explain i've never seen one of these things myself so people say well what do you know about it or i can read these inscriptions which is what i've done but on the other hand it gives me a kind of detachment because if i wrote a book so i'm writing this book because i saw a ghost and i know what they're like

and you have to believe me because i'm telling you people won't even read it but i'm very sympathetic to the matter because you know if you're looking indian resources china and tibet and all over europe and you know wherever you find writings they're not publicized statements for the world at large they're just records you know clergymen write down things that happen and local people write down things that happen and there's a huge backlog of unsolicited recording and description of these things which nobody puts together into a general picture it's very fascinating anyway i can't do all that all i did was to write about the first ones because in the bm we have all these records it's just marvelous you know and there are spells we now have to get rid of them so there is a gruesome underworld where people went you see so when you

were buried you went down into the underworld and you were supposed to stay there. That was the whole system. And most people probably did. That was okay. But it's the troublesome ones who didn't that caused the difficulty. And the way they write about these things are very matter of fact. And one of the most convincing matter of fact things is this, I tell you, that they had the idea sometimes that ghosts, when they came back, if they weren't peeved personally or irritable, they might have a message. And ghosts didn't often say anything. And there are one or two rituals for this, that when a ghost is there for compelling it to answer questions, because it's very annoying if you think the ghost has come up to tell you something you can't find out. And the most extraordinary way of doing it was this, that you have a skull.

You procure a skull because people were often buried under the floor in their houses. And you could, in fact, get your grandfather's skull if you wanted to. And this was not an everyday matter, but it was carried out. The skull would be anointed with a special oil and the exorcist would come and they would burn incense and everybody involved would be very keyed up and then there's a big invocation to the sun god to bring up the shade of this person from the netherworld to answer questions and according to this inscription the person goes into the skull and then answers the questions there in front of you So we have a literature to get rid of ghosts, which is most of it,

but also a little bit of literature for bringing them up to ask them a leading question. You listen to Dan Snow's history, we're talking about ghosts in ancient Assyria. So there we go. More after this. Hi, I'm Professor Susanna Lipscomb. And in my podcast, Not Just the Tudors,

we talk about everything from sex to spying, wardrobes to witch trials. Not, in other words, just the Tudors, but most definitely also the Tudors. Subscribe from History Hit, wherever you get your podcasts. land a viking longship on island shores scramble over the dunes of ancient egypt and avoid the poisoner's cup in renaissance florence each week on echoes of history we uncover the epic stories that inspire assassin's creed we're stepping into feudal Japan in our special series Chasing Shadows, where samurai warlords and shinobi spies teach us the tactics and skills needed not

only to survive, but to conquer. Whether you're preparing for Assassin's Creed Shadows or fascinated by history and great stories, listen to Echoes of History, a Ubisoft podcast brought to you by History Hits. There are new episodes every week. Now, you're going to have to excuse my extreme ignorance here, but when we say cuneiform, we're talking inscription on bits of tablet? Yes, that's the stuff. People wrote on clay because in ancient Iraq, Mesopotamia,

they had all this marvellous clay down the banks of the rivers, which took impressions beautifully. So in about 3,200 BC, they started writing. And this writing very rapidly turned into what we call cuneiform writing. So it's made of signs of different strokes, which are each impressed into the clay with a chopstick, so to speak. So you have the sign for water. There are three separate applications, plonk, plonk, plonk, and that's the sign for water. So you had to learn all these signs to write the language. And cuneiform means what the signs look like so the thing is when you write on clay which they

sensibly did it means that the material survives in the ground forever and ever so in the 19th century when there were big excavations they found tablets by the thousand some of which went back to 3000 BC, 2000, 1000 BC, where all these messages written then by private persons, which were buried in the ground and lasted, came to light, and we can read them with a great deal of accuracy and listen to their voices. And ironically, clay, which you might think is a very messy material and cuneiform writing a very complicated material together preserved our first account of many aspects of the human mind that we have in the bm about 130 000 of them they're absolutely marvelous and so you've got the vinderlander tablets from the legionary fortress just south of hadrian's wall they are sort of letters from one person to other what are these kid ares? Are these personal? Are they diaries? Are they official statements? Are they literature?

Why do they write them down? It's a good question. It's a big question. Basically, there's very little private literature. We don't have diaries, but we have correspondence in great quantity, often business and marriage arrangements, things like that. Lots and lots of letters we have. That's one thing. Then we have the royal inscriptions of the kings and the law codes and the historical accounts of what they did and the mythological accounts, literature, things like the Epic of Gilgamesh, the famous thing like that. And we have spells and incantations and cures and lists of plants and censuses. In fact, they use writing on these cuneiform tablets for a pretty extensive span that corresponds to how we traditionally use writing.

But the thing that you mentioned at the beginning, the diaries, personal accounts, that's the one thing we don't have. But the Vindolanda letters are marvellous because it's like listening through the window of somebody's house when someone's talking to another person. The whole of the experience comes straight through the window into our ears and it's the same with this clay stuff it's like tuning in and sometimes you have correspondence on one side and the other side and you can see how they don't believe one another and they argue with one another and when you're very lucky you get the whole picture coming out of this

dead stuff that looks like nothing on earth. You mentioned the 19th century excavations. Are they still pulling them out today? Well, there's not so much excavation going on today, but when they do excavate seriously in a major site, you can be sure of finding these tablets because unless they're literally thrown in the river Tigris, they tend to last in the ground. So if you dig at a certain period, you follow rooms, you find a gateway, you find administrative buildings or temples. If you're lucky, on the floor or in boxes or things, you might find inscriptions that have been there ever since waiting for us. It's very remarkable. So there's lots more to find out.

Well, most of the cuneiform tablets that we know in the world, most of them come from what is now Iraq, what the Greeks called Mesopotamia, between the Euphrates and Tigris rivers. That heartland was where this writing started off. And from my perspective, as somebody who reads these tablets, the whole landscape is full of them under the ground waiting to be discovered. Because when you have literacy in a society, you don't have one city with writing and one without writing, it just spreads everywhere. And they all have the same urgency for record keeping and correspondence and what

have you. So probably most of the sites of ancient Iraq, certainly the ones BC, which go back to the Neolithic and what have you, but certainly the historical periods BC, all the sites ought to have inscriptions in. And of the ones that we do have in places like the British Museum and elsewhere, how many of them have been read by experts like you? Well, the thing is this, when they came in the 19th century, you know, over 100,000 of them, they were immediately catalogued with a quick description. And from the back of this quick description, it became possible for scholars who were looking for particular things, for example, when they first worked on the story of Gilgamesh, the 12-tablet

hero story, when they were working on that, they were able to use these primary notes to find in the collection things which belonged to it. And then once things were identified as being part of the same composition, they were then published and translated and republished and retranslated. And it's an ongoing process because, as you can imagine, clay tablets, like if you have a short cake and drop it on the floor in the kitchen, you'll have four large pieces and a number of crumbs. But it's much the same with a clay tablet. If it's looked after, it can be complete, but often they're broken.

And because the excavations were done on such a scale in the 19th century, very regularly, huge consignments arrived, say 20,000 tablets sometimes, where you had complete tablets, half tablets, quarter tablets, and lots of fragments, all of which are safely in the collection

and which idiots like me spend their entire lives trying to find the bits that join together. safely in the collection and which idiots like me spend their entire lives trying to find the bits that join together and in the past it's been a rather laborious so to speak manual crisis but of course in today's world where things are different electronic documentation has been a great asset so big swathes of our collection have been digitally photographed and people who work on these resources are able to use these photographs wherever they are and sometimes they identify pieces that join together and so forth. So it's a big leap forward in the practical application of it. So how many you read? Not enough, I say would be the answer. But ballpark, what kind of proportion of them?

Well I should think, say we've got 130,000. I think we've got a pretty good idea of what's in about 80,000 of them and a slight idea of the others. I've looked at every tablet myself, and I'm sure John Taylor, my colleague, has done the same. So we kind of know what's where, the sorts of things. But there are many tablets that have never been read in modern times properly. And of course, you can't pick them up like a newspaper and whiz through them often they're fragmentary and difficult and you have to work so in some ways people could say well you've had all this stuff since 1850 what you've been doing

but the other thing is it's all safe and we've got enough work to do for another 200 years so that's also a comforting matter just in case it's not possible to get any more out of the ground in the future. Well, listen, any graduates listening to this, you want a job for life, you give Irving a call, sounds like a sweet gig for the next 200 years. Yes, of course. And when you start writing books about ghosts and the world to come, it doesn't have to stop with life. You can just keep going as far as I can see. And there's plenty of marvellous, marvellous things to do. Astronomy, astrology, all those sorts of things, mathematics, lexicography, serious disciplines, I think, and of course telling the future,

because that was their crucial thing to try and predict what was going to happen. So we have lots and lots of literature of this kind. Just give me some of your favourite things you've gleaned from these tablets, about ghosts in particular. I have members of my family that are interested in ghosts and I can impart some ancient wisdom to them. Is each ghost different

or they all respond to certain things to keep away? Well, the first thing is if you know lots of people who are interested and if they really want a compendious list of these resources to have in their bathroom cabinet just in case, there's a very simple way to do it without you still acquiring a copy of this new book just about to come out where they're all there easily to hand but sometimes they are a bit funny but my favorite one of all is this the bloke says something like this you ghosts why do you keep appearing to me why do you keep coming after me he says i am not going to kutha now kutha was a babylonian city where the entrance to the underworld was located and what he says to these ghosts that you can say what you like i think the ghosts are kind of going like this with a bony finger saying come with us come with us i'm not

going and then he recruits the names of the most powerful underworld goddesses the queen of the underworld and another goddess who has a lapis lazuli writing stick and she keeps the register so she had a kind of in out system so if there was a ghost that's supposed to be in the underground and it isn't there this goddess will know about it and if you report to the goddess with her stick and she makes a note this ghost is going to be in trouble so he kind of drags in the head master and head mysteries as a kind of threat so it's an incredibly human thing and underneath it there are two things one is the mechanism of the ghost thing is not a kind of conventional explanation of the unknown or a euphemism to what we don't understand it is a literal literal belief in the

matter and the way that it's dealt with in the first thing is slightly sarcastic i'm not going to the cemetery he says i'm not going with so you can just imagine, buoyed up perhaps by this priest telling him what to say, that, you know, go away, I'm not coming with you. And that's kind of funny in some respects, I think. I think it's very funny indeed. So after ghosts, what is next? You mentioned all these other areas of study. What are you going to launch into next?

Well, I'm writing a book about the Royal Game of Orr, the famous board game from mesopotamia which there's 3 000 years of evidence and the rules and all that kind of stuff that's very complicated and i've been doing that for ages but i'm going to do that next i'm also writing a book about diaries since you mentioned diaries because i started this system in britain to prevent more being thrown away and being rescued for the future because i think people's private diaries are a bit like cuneiform tablets from antiquity because they're full of messages.

And in the future, they'll be marvelous. So we've already got about 12,000 of them. And we're going to save as many personal diaries as possible, which will have the same kind of function. Because if you read an old diary, it brings 1890 or 1915 or something very vividly to life when you read the words, exactly as an ancient

clay tablet does in the 1500 bc it's the same kind of principle listen to this if people got a diary how do they get in touch with you where do they send it to a great diary project it's in bishopsgate institute near liverpool street station the archivist there polly and stefan they will take any diary any kind kind whatsoever, even written on a mirror with lipstick, no problem whatsoever. And we've got three centuries of stuff and they come in and they come in and they're just marvellous. And to me, they're exactly the same kind of thing as these cabinets of clay. It's very wonderful. Wonderful. Please take your things to Polly, everybody listening. Irving, thank you very much indeed. See you soon. Be well.

I feel we have the history on our shoulders. All this tradition of ours, our school history, our songs, this part of the history of our country, all were gone and finished. Thanks, folks, for listening to this episode of Danston's History.

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And if you want to listen to the other podcasts in our ever-increasing stable, don't forget we've got Susanna Lipscomb with Not Just the Tudors. That's flying high in the charts. We've got our Medieval podcast, Gone Med just the tudors that's flying high in the charts we've got our medieval podcast gone medieval the brilliant matt lewis and cat jarman we've got the ancients with our very own tristan hughes and we've got warfare as well dealing with all things military please go and check those out wherever you get your pods you