The First Ghosts: Most Ancient of Legacies

Ghosts were already ancient long before the classical world. In The First Ghosts, Assyriologist Irving Finkel traces humanity’s relationship with the restless dead back to the civilisations of ancient Mesopotamia, where surviving clay tablets preserve some of the earliest written evidence for ghosts, hauntings and rituals intended to deal with them.

Drawing on cuneiform sources and archaeological evidence, Finkel explores what Mesopotamians believed ghosts were, why they returned, how they could trouble the living and what might be done to appease or remove them. At once a study of ancient belief and a history of an enduring human fear, the book opens a vivid window onto Mesopotamian ideas about death, memory and the boundary between the living and the dead.