Hello, my name is Irving Finkel and I'm a curator in the British Museum
in the Middle East Department and this is Curator's Corner once more...
Okay so today we're going to talk about demons, ghosts, sprites
things that cause trouble to ancient persons in Mesopotamia
and how those who thought they could deal with them dealt with them.
So they had a rather interesting system that applied in Mesopotamian culture
that's to say the Sumerians and especially the Babylonians and Assyrians after them
because human beings when they were born they were kind of put under the protection of a particular God
and this God had responsibility for you as you grew up and went through life
now this is rather a nice system, but the trouble about it is that the Mesopotamian view of deities
was modeled on their view of the human race
which, of course, has a result that the individuals are unreliable, they tell lies
they are adulterous, they get drunk,they get bored, they get easily distracted
and the gods did the same. So this meant that it wasn't 24-hour coverage
and this had a bad consequence because there were lots of things that largely you couldn't see which were
waiting to zap you and if you've been abandoned by your personal deity or
you've been particularly unpleasant in your behavior to somebody else they
might come for you, so some of these demons are very identifiable
The choicest one is called Lamashtu and this Lamashtu is a lion-headed female
who is depicted on stone amulets suckling a wolf and a dog, with snakes, riding on the back of a donkey in a boat
and sometimes the carvings are very complicated so they knew exactly what she looked like
but they knew precisely why they wanted to have nothing to do with her
because her interest was in children, babies, pregnant women and so forth
and there's some very poetic texts which talk about Lamashtu prowling down the street
and sniffing through all the door jams and trying to see if there's a new baby there
because she would sneak in and devour it. So she, Lamashtu, is intelligibly to be seen as the personification
of the danger of childbirth which, of course, in ancient times and often subsequently
has been a very hazardous thing for women and she was the focus of the thing they all feared
Very lithe and very dangerous and one interesting thing which also comes out
when you start looking at the amulets is she had an enemy and this enemy was called Pazuzu
and Pazuzu is very ugly, grotesque face and when you see a Pazuzu you think that it must be evil
must be something I don't want to have anything to do with but it was just the opposite
because this Pazuzu, the sight of his face was enough to drive Lamashtu away altogether.
We've got some very good amulets which will show you this and
clearly if Lamashtu saw him through the window she would go away
Now, we don't know why the sight of this Pazuzu should have had such an effect on Lamashtu
but I have a personal interpretation of it which is the following
there is no evidence for this theory but my theory is that
once they were married and they had a very very inimical divorce
one of those divorces which you often encounter in literature and especially in real life
when one partner cannot bear the sight or the other one under any circumstances
and that would explain I think the powerful and effective nature of this deterrent
however in the hands of Hollywood Pazuzu suffered a great criticism
in fact a slanderous attack on his personality
because there was a film once in which a girl who looked like a perfectly normal girl
suddenly started spewing green things and her head went round on her shoulders.
At the beginning of that film laid the trouble which beset this unfortunate girl
at this demon, which you had to be there right at the beginning of the film to see
this Pazuzu head on the floor and Hollywood thought the Pazuzu was wicked
but in point of fact is just the opposite.
So some of the demons may do very ill, they had an idea a bit like possession
they go into the body, they would perverse all the systems inside
they'd make you very ill indeed and the exorcist had to drive the thing out of the body
and make the person well again so they had different devices for this
sometimes they burnt things that you had to inhale
sometimes you had bits of wool with amulets around your fingers
and also other things they were expert in once they knew which was the evil they knew what to do about it.
One way to get rid of the inimical figures that you want to see the back of
is to literally put them in a toy boat a model boat and sometimes for example
with that Lamashtu who likes babies she's put in the boat and she's given things
like a sandwich box and hairpin and a comb, feminine things so to speak
which she'll be distracted by and then the exorcist puts this little boats into the Tigris River
which is very fast-moving and whsst the boat it disappears and goes off
hopefully to the border with Elam.
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