ghosts, Mesopotamia

The Old Babylonian Atrahasīs epic details the creation of man from clay mixed with the flesh and blood of an immortal god. Accordingly, in ancient Mesopotamia, humans were thought to have a part that survived death. This surviving part was called “ghost” (eṭemmu in Akkadian/gedim in Sumerian). After a proper burial, the ghosts of the dead dwelled in the netherworld, a distant part of the cosmos governed by the goddess Ereshkigal and her spouse Nergal. Since ghosts not only preserved part of their former human identity but also hunger, thirst, and the need for attention, their peaceful rest depended on the care offered by their living kin in the form of the offerings and commemorative rites that constituted the core of Mesopotamian family religion. If these funerary rituals were neglected or a corpse was not buried properly, ghosts turned into restlessly roaming or evil ghosts that plagued the living, akin to demons, and caused all kinds of distress. With regard to the modern study of ideas and practices related to ghosts in Mesopotamia, the corpus of cuneiform texts dealing with rituals against ghosts and the phenomenology of ghostly apparitions from 1st-millennium Babylonia and Assyria stands out as a particularly rich source of information. Other essential materials include Sumerian and Akkadian literary texts that describe images of the netherworld, burial sites, and related funerary objects that offer archaeological evidence for cultural concepts and related practices about death and the afterlife. However, due to the vast chronological, geographical, and typological scope of the sources, the modern study of the Mesopotamian ghost still faces fundamental research challenges, such as comprehending the distinction between the ghosts of the dead, on the one hand, and different other ghost-like beings, such as demons or the zaqīqu-phantom, a phenomenon comparable to the concept of a “dream soul” in other cultures, on the other.