Ereshkigal and Other Mesopotamian Ghosts

You may have seen this terracotta plaque from Ancient Mesopotamia (1800-1750 BCE ) known as the Burney Relief in your art history classes or, if you are lucky, at the British Museum where it resides. Often the lovely animal-human hybrid figure is associated with Ishtar, but the case can easily be made that instead she is Ereshkigal, Queen of the Underworld — check out her folded wings and bird-talon clawed feet. Ereshkigal was a super important Goddess in Ancient Mesopotamia, because she governed the dead and kept them in their place. The souls in her kingdom had a bleak existence. The phrase “dust was their food and clay was their drink” appears not just in the Epic of Gilgamesh but in other sources. The bolt of the door that keeps the dead in Ereshkigal’s abode is covered in dust, showing how none may leave.

However, exceptions were known, and some dead spirits were thought to be able to make an appearance in the living world. These were the Mesopotamian ghosts, known as “etemmu” in Akkadian. These ghosts were taken for granted as being reality by Mesopotamian peoples, and they were almost always unwelcome. They resurfaced for a variety of reasons, including the following that are listed on a cuneiform tablet from 612 BCE: “whether you be a strange ghost, or or a forgotten ghost, or a roving ghost who has no one to care for him, whether you be a ghost who died as a result of a sin against a god or an offense against a king or a ghost who died when his fate was completed . . . ” The passage is part of an exorcism ritual. Indeed, the living had many responsibilities to the dead, who were often buried under a house or courtyard. Food and drink ritual offerings were expected, and the dead who did not receive them or whose graves were plundered did not rest easily. Professional necromancers could even raise the dead to ask them questions, but most ghosts who made their way to the land of the living were troublesome.

A lot of Mesopotamian incantations, protective amulets, and rituals evolved to take care of the noisome dead, who could inflict madness, hallucinations, or even illness upon their living targets.