Roaming, Malicious, Hooligan Ghosts: Mesopotamian Ghostbusting
Moudhy Al-Rashid, 27 January 2022
At the back of the British Museum is a cavernous room lined with hundreds of cased wooden drawers supported by a central architrave. Each drawer contains tens of glass-topped boxes of various sizes with neat, typewritten labels. The boxes contain clay tablets from ancient Mesopotamia, around 130,000 of them, inscribed in cuneiform, many broken and eroded. An agricultural boom at the end of...
