A 3,500 - year - quondam tablet held in the British Museum has been reveal as picture a ghost , with didactics   for how to avoid the look of the dead hanging around make trouble for the support . The find has become the centrepiece of a forthcoming record on the path one of the first civilisation reckon the undead .

Dr Irving Finkelis Assistant Keeper of Ancient Mesopotamian items at the British Museum and has spent a lifetime learn about how the neighborhood ’s ancient civilizations saw the humanity . On examining one of the museum ’s many Babylonian tablets , he noticed something no one had seen before – in the right light , and from an appropriate angle , a lozenge reveals the outline of two figure , one with hand bound and on a lead .

The tablet , Finkel concludes , portrays the ghost of a in-between - ripened adult female who needs to be returned to the underworld . To do so , an attractive unseasoned man has been conjured up to company her . To ensure this occurs , drawings of both of them , with her holding him on a lead , were bury along with other thing they might need .

The back of the tablet carries instructions on removing a ghost who ; “ seizes custody of a person and pursues him and can not be free . ” This involved making and suitably arrange figurines of a homo and woman , offer them with items such as a bottom and coxcomb . Ritual arrangements were to be made at dawn with two vessel of beer and an incantation to the Sun God .

The text ends with teaching , “ Do not look behind you , ”   resonant of the narration of Orpheus and Lot ’s married woman .

“ It is a Guinness Book of Records object because how could anybody have a drawing of a shade which was honest-to-goodness ? ” Finkel toldthe Guardian .

Finkel has put the lozenge in context with other Mesopotamian mention to spirits in the bookThe First Ghosts : Most Ancient of Legacies , to be published next calendar month . “ Ghosts inhabit something of the very essence of what it is to be human , ” he notes , pass on Babylonian wisdom about how not only to be free of them , but to wreak them back and avoid becoming one yourself .

“ When a person died in Mesopotamia , as far as we empathize it , they had to be lay in the land with a kind of ritual so they were jolly well lock in so they would n’t come back and cause difficulty , ” Finkel said inan interviewfor the museum website .

impression in ghosts was universal at the prison term , Finkel enounce , but people were sympathetic , ascertain departed spirit as needing to be helped back to where they belonged rather than as something malevolent to fight . The elision was specter of people dreadful even in living , and not improved by decease , or else slipping into people ’s ears and causing hemicrania . The ritual the tablet describe would have been uncommitted to the very wealthy for a eminent price , Finkel believe , but the poor would have had to put up with troublesome spirit .

Finkel ’s most far-famed discovery was a tablet telling of a mighty flood ,   appearing to have been the origin of the story of Noah ’s Ark more than a thousand years before it made its way of life into the Bible . The proto - Noah tale was so widespread in Mesopotamia that numerous tablets recounting dissimilar versions of it have been set up .

Finkel ’s however , is the only one cognise thatrefers to animalsbrought into the ark “ two by two ” , attach to by detailed instructions for ark construction should the floods return .

In a worldly concern of melting ice - cap we may need all the flotation devices we can get , so Finkel ’s discovery was used to build a one - third scalemodel ark , which indeed proved perky , albeit incapable of preserving all of creation .

Those seeking more detail can sign up for next week’sonline eventwith Dr Finkel .