“Ghosts were taken for granted as part of everyday Mesopotamian life”

Ellie Cawthorne: You argue that “most, possibly even all, human beings everywhere truly believe in ghosts”. Why do you think humans are inclined to believe that the dead might return to exist among us?

Irving Finkel: In the modern world, ghosts have a funny status. Most people don’t wear their ghosts on their sleeves, because there’s a good chance they’d be branded idiots for believing in such things. But when you look into the matter historically, we have plenty of testimonies concerning ghosts, coming from all over the world and covering a huge span of time. They date right back to the very first written material that we have – cuneiform tablets from ancient Mesopotamia, in what is now Iraq, developed before 3000 BC. And this earliest written evidence is what I focus on in my book.

Arguably, you can trace this ghost business back even farther than the beginning of writing. I would posit that the concept of something hanging around after death goes back to the very dawn of mankind. Take as an example a Neanderthal burial in which the body is laid out in a prepared grave, in a particular position, alongside special bits and pieces. The point here is this: if you bury somebody in the ground to get rid of them because they’re smelly and dangerous, that’s one thing. But burying them in a special way with goods implies that your expectation is that, once the horrible bodily chemicals have disappeared, something – most likely the essence of the person – comes out of the body and goes