Figures of Babylon: oldest drawing of a ghost found in British Museum vault A 3,500-year-old image tablet of a ‘miserable male ghost’ gives up its secret

Read the story at The Guardian here

Figures of Babylon: oldest drawing of a ghost found in British Museum vault

A 3,500-year-old image tablet of a ‘miserable male ghost’ gives up its secret

A lonely spirit being led to eternal bliss by a lover on a Babylonian clay tablet. White line tracing © James Fraser and Chris Cobb for The First Ghosts, by Irving Finkel. Photograph: The British Museum

Dalya Alberge

Sat 16 Oct 2021 13.00 EDT

Its outlines are faint, only discernible at an angle, but the world’s oldest drawing of a ghost has been discovered in the darkened vaults of the British Museum.

A lonely bearded spirit being led into the afterlife and eternal bliss by a lover has been identified on an ancient Babylonian clay tablet created about 3,500 years ago.

It is part of an exorcist’s guide to getting rid of unwanted ghosts by addressing the particular malaise that brought them back to the world of the living – in this case, a ghost in desperate need of a companion. He is shown walking with his arms outstretched, his wrists tied by a rope held by the female, while an accompanying text details a ritual that would to dispatch them happily to the underworld.

Irving Finkel

Dr Irving Finkel, curator of the Middle Eastern department at the British Museum, said the “absolutely spectacular object from antiquity” had been overlooked until now.

“It’s obviously a male ghost and he’s miserable. You can imagine a tall, thin, bearded ghost hanging about the house did get on people’s nerves. The final analysis was that what this ghost needed was a lover,” he said.

“You can’t help but imagine what happened before. ‘Oh God, Uncle Henry’s back.’ Maybe Uncle Henry’s lost three wives. Something that everybody knew was that the way to get rid of the old bugger was to marry him off. It’s not fanciful to read this into it. It’s a kind of explicit message. There’s very high-quality writing there and immaculate draughtsmanship.

“That somebody thinks they can get rid of a ghost by giving them a bedfellow is quite comic.”

As a world authority on cuneiform, a system of writing used in the ancient Middle East, Finkel realised that the tablet had been incorrectly deciphered previously. The drawing had been missed as the ghost only comes to life when viewed from above and under a light. Forgotten since its acquisition by the museum in the 19th century, the tablet has never even been exhibited.

Irving Finkel, a world authority on cuneiform script, tells the story of his ghostly discovery in The First Ghosts.

Finkel said: “You’d probably never give it a second thought because the area where the drawings are looks like it’s got no writing. But when you examine it and hold it under a lamp, those figures leap out at you across time in the most startling way. It is a Guinness Book of Records object because how could anybody have a drawing of a ghost which was older?”

While half the tablet is missing and it is small enough to fit in a person’s hand, the back bears an extensive text with the instructions for dealing with a ghost that “seizes hold of a person and pursues him and cannot be loosed”. The ritual involves making figurines of a man and a woman: “You dress the man in an everyday shift and equip him with travel provisions. You wrap the woman in four red garments and clothe her in a purple cloth. You give her a golden brooch. You equip her fully with bed, chair, mat and towel; you give her a comb and a flask.

“At sunrise towards the sun you make the ritual arrangements and set up two carnelian vessels of beer. You set in place a special vessel and set up a juniper censer with juniper. You draw the curtain like that of the diviner. You [put] the figurines together with their equipment and place them in position… and say as follows, Shamash [god of the sun and judge of the underworld by night].”

The text ends with a warning: “Do not look behind you!”

Finkel believes the tablet was part of a library of magic in the house of an exorcist or in a temple.

The ghost has appeared just in time for Halloween. Its discovery features in Finkel’s forthcoming book, The First Ghosts: Most Ancient of Legacies, to be published on 11 November by Hodder & Stoughton.

He himself has never seen a ghost, “even in the shadier vaults of the British Museum”, which is “riddled with ghosts”, he said. “In the King’s Library, more than one person has seen a head and shoulders moving along but at a peculiar height. That was dismissed by sceptics, but it turns out that the original floor under the present floor was actually low, which means that they were about right.”

He hopes to exhibit the Babylonian tablet, noting that such an artefact brings us closer to our ancestors: “All the fears and weaknesses and characteristics that make the human race so fascinating, assuredly were there in spades 3,500 years ago.

“I want people to know about this culture. Egypt always wins in Hollywood. If the Babylonian underworld is anything like it was described, then they’re all still there. So just remember that.”

It’s 2022. What’s still the purpose of a college education?

Education must enable one to sift and weigh evidence, to discern the true from the false, the real from the unreal, and the facts from the fiction. The function of education, therefore, is to teach one to think intensively and to think critically.

Martin Luther King, “The Purpose of Education,” The Maroon Tiger, January 1, 1947 to February 28, 1947.

Robert Gerst: the heat of life in the handful of dust

I remember my youth and the feeling that will never come back any more—the feeling that I could last for ever, outlast the sea, the earth, and all men; the deceitful feeling that lures us on to joys, to perils, to love, to vain effort—to death; the triumphant conviction of strength, the heat of life in the handful of dust, the glow in the heart that with every year grows dim, grows cold, grows small, and expires—and expires, too soon—before life itself.

Joseph Conrad, Youth

Thinking back on them, the countless trips my son and I took up and down this path all merge into one, perhaps because one summer is every summer and every summer is every life. The path runs along the canal for seven miles and the wind blows almost always from the south, so the heading back into the wind is always more difficult than the heading out and in the mornings when we start the ships and boats heading up north seem moving with us like bathtub toys flying flags and leaving large white wakes that wash up on the shore. I remember once a fisherman who was every fisherman with his rumpled shirt falling to his hips and his stolid casting in a stream of water where no fish has ever been caught in my viewing.

We started taking this trip when my son was no bigger than my hip and now he towers over me, lanky and sinewy while I am feeling fits of dizziness and we have never stopped doing this because, I think, we feel it as a moment together in the vast blank loneliness of life. I know that what I have to say is what everyone has to say: that life is evanescent and the blink of a firefly. But the trip is worth taking. It is always the same: the trucks rushing along the highway, the ripples of the herring run, the branches of the shrubs obscuring the way along the road, and always the feeling that in the glorious sun—it is perpetually sunny—the joy of passing up is the same as the joy of passing down.

We bike to the beach where the jetty is perpetually the same—the same riprap rocks leading to the light at the end where the children gather and the lobster pots float—and we dive into the water, always scrotum crushing cold, and we dive beneath the surface. The hot sand, the girls on the beach sunning, the rustle of the surf. It is all a jumble, a moment in time, and there is no time, only the endless present.

I am sitting now on the porch beneath the fan where I always sit this time of year gazing at the green lawn where the roses droop from the rain and the daisies are emerging.

Robert Gerst