Edited by Rachel Heung
Do you believe in ghosts? Have you ever tried to draw a ghost? Does it look like Casper – a rounded shape with a wiggly tail? Does it have a friendly expression on its face or a scary one? Well about 3,500 years ago the people who lived in Babylonia, had their own ideas about ghosts, why they haunt a person and how to get rid of them. They even wrote an instruction with a drawing.
The newly discovered drawing on a tablet in the British Museum shows a bearded man, with outstretched hands tied with a rope, with an expression of someone not particularly happy and definitely not scary, and even maybe a bit sad. The rope is held by a female, who is leading the man. The expert, Dr Irving Finkel, curator of the Middle Eastern department at the British Museum said that this signals “that what this ghost needed was a lover” (Guardian, n.d.). Experts have decided that the drawing of this man is a ghost because on the back of the tablet there is text that explains how to exterminate a ghost if they continue to haunt a person (New York Post, n.d.).
Babylon was an ancient culture and one of the greatest civilizations in history that made a lot of new inventions and developments in science and scholarship. Sumerians invented the first system of writing called cuneiform. Babylon was also the location of the Hanging Gardens, one of the seven wonders of the ancient world.
It is very interesting that the ghost on the tablet decided to appear before the scientists right before Halloween this year, although the tablet was acquired by the museum in the 19th century (Guardian, n.d.). It was probably missed before because the drawing is very faint and becomes visible only with a certain light under a certain angle. The tablet is also very small, it can fit into a human’s palm. Dr Finkel has a plan to write a whole book about this ghost titled The First Ghosts: Most Ancient of Legacies that will be published by Hodder & Stoughton.
Bibliography
Gibbon, J. F. (2021, October 17). Oldest known drawing of a ghost found on
3,500-year-old tablet. New York Post. Retrieved October 19, 2021, from
https://nypost.com/2021/10/17/oldest-know-drawing-of-a-ghost-found-on-3500-year-
old-tablet/
Alberge, D. (2021, October 16). Figures of Babylon: oldest drawing of a ghost
found in British Museum vault. The Guardian. Retrieved October 19, 2021,
from https://www.theguardian.com/culture/2021/oct/16/
figures-of-babylon-oldest-drawing-of-a-ghost-found-in-british-museum-vault
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