Ghosts of the Ancient Past - Mesopotamia
Mesopotamia (Sumeria, Babylon, and Assyria)
Moving through time and space to the Ancient Near East in the Fertile Cresent. In the "Cradle of Civilization", [really, only one of them] death is, importantly, the great equalizer. One of the Babylonian tablets tells a 5000-year-old ghost story, dating to roughly 1500 BCE. Although about half of the clay tablet is missing (the top half), the researchers that worked on it read that it was calling upon the solar god Shamash with an offering of beer to transfer a ghost into a figurine (Gershen 2021). And, wonderfully, as a ghost story should, the tablet ends with the perfect ghost-story ending, the reader is told 'to not look behind you' (Gershen 2021). [Perfectly primed for a jump scare.]
Gidim (gidim𒄇) in Sumerian, which was borrowed as eṭemmu in Akkadian, was the word given to the beings that were created at the time of death, with the memories and personality of the dead person (Spar, 2021). Before continuing, these beings beg the question, are they the actual peoples' spirits/souls or are they new beings that are copies? The wording is a bit ambiguous to me, and if they are just a memory or an energy recording are the original spirits in Irkalla (the Underworld), where they should have remained forever, or are they trapped "reliving" particular moments [like we can see in the Netflix series Bly Manor]. Like with the Aborigines in Australia and, as we'll see, the vast majority of human cultural traditions one of the three main reasons ghosts return to blight the living is because burial customs are not being followed or completed.
In some areas feeding the dead is a hugely important tradition. As an act that will also be followed in Egypt, if the family can't personally give food to their deceased relatives they'll pay for someone else (typically a priest) to enact the ritual for them. In the context of Mesopotamia, the implications of the ritual take on additional importance. Once a gidim is created they aren't seen as good or evil and they are meant to travel to Irkalla to have a position (job) assigned to them (Black et al 1992). If the family doesn't make regular offerings of food and drink, the ghosts could turn restless and vengeful, returning to spread illness (physical and/or mental) and misfortunes upon their living relatives which could be fixed with necromancy (Black et al. 1992; Scrurlock 2006). [The extreme case of sending care packages to children at summer camp or students who moved away for college.]
Gidim could also return because they must settle unfinished business or if they died a violent death. For whatever reason, gidim would have to sneak out of Irkalla to harass the living. And, connecting to the Babylonian tablet, these were the ones that were punished by Shamash. In the underworld, they would have any of their funerary offerings taken away and given to the well-behaved gidim who didn't receive offerings from their own relations. In the mythology of the afterlife, people believed that the soul could travel in and out of Irkalla, even though souls should be there forever, and infiltrate the mortal world. And any gidim who returned for any personal reason was believed to have not found peace because they didn't receive all the proper burial rites.
[If any of this is true, I'm surprised we don't experience thousand of ancient ghosts because none of them are receiving offerings, and haven't for thousands of years.]
And the Akkadian tale, The Epic of Gilgamesh dates to between c. 2100-1200 BCE.
In Tablets 11-12, Gilgamesh is overcome by the death of his best friend/possible lover Enkidu so he sets out on a series of journeys to search for his ancestor Utnapishtim. Gilgamesh found him living at the mouth of the rivers as he had been given eternal life because he survived the Noah’s Ark-like flood. Utnapishtim counseled Gilgamesh to abandon his search for immortality but tells him about a plant that can make him young again anyways. After an extensive search and some adventure, Gilgamesh obtains the plant from the bottom of the sea in Dilmun (current day Bahrain) but a serpent steals it. Once Gilgamesh returned to his home city of Urukhaving he abandoned hope of either immortality or renewed youth. Then he finds out that all he has to do is to stay awake for six days and seven nights, but he fails and falls asleep. Out of this, the ghost of Enkidu rose “like a wind” and the two friends embraced. Gilgamish immediately questions the ghost about the condition of the dead, but Enkidu does not answer because Enkidu knew what he would reveal would only cause his friend Gilgamesh sorrow. But the last lines of the Tablet tell the lot of those who have died in various circumstances; though some who have been duly buried are in better case, the fate of others who have none to pay them honour is miserable, for they are reduced to feeding upon dregs and scraps of food thrown into the street. (Budge 1920).
This shows an early example of the dead returning to the dreams of the living, and it's a good thing. In some translations of the story, Enkidu does return fully to the land of the living, to walk with Gilgamesh, but that doesn't typically come up for us normal humans. We aren't powerful enough by ourselves or brought back by gods to talk to kings. In either case, the realm of dreams seems to be an area between the dead and the living and is often used in ancient to modern urban legends in which the dead have to relay some information about their death or to comfort their loved ones. In this way, we are shown the most important point of having ghost stories in the first place, giving hope to people who want to see their deceased loved ones again. Also, leaving out the horror aspect of being trapped in a world that we can't change.
