Hello and welcome to the History Extra podcast from BBC History Magazine, Britain's best-selling history magazine.

I'm Ellie Cawthorne. Just how long have humans believed in ghosts?

Well, according to Irving Finkel, the curator of ancient Mesopotamian script, languages and cultures at the British Museum, evidence of

ghost beliefs can be found all the way back in the very oldest written sources that we have,

and possibly even further. In his new book, The First Ghosts, Irving unpicks what we can learn

about supernatural beliefs from ancient Mesopotamian

Cuneoform tablets. I spoke to him to find out more. Your book takes us back to ancient

Mesopotamia to uncover the first evidence that we have for humanity's belief in ghosts.

And you say that your own personal conclusion is that most, possibly even all human beings everywhere, really truly believe in ghosts.

To start us off on that idea, why do you believe that?

Why do you think that we're so eager to think that the dead might return to exist among us?

Well, one of the reasons is this, that there's so much

testimony all over the world for such a long period of time. Because in the modern world,

ghosts have a funny status, because people don't talk about them very freely, because if they do

in front of somebody who doesn't believe in them, they think they're an idiot. So, on the whole, people don't talk about them very freely because if they do in front of somebody who doesn't believe in them,

they think they're an idiot. So on the whole, people don't wear their ghosts on their sleeve.

But when you look into the matter historically, it is extraordinary that with the first writing that

we have, which is this cuneiform writing, we have lots and lots of evidence.

Now, the thing is, in the British Museum, we have stuff, archaeological stuff from all over the world,

all the cultures of the world, before writing, and then the beginning of writing, and afterwards.

And the beginning of writing is about 3,000 BC, something like that, in ancient Iraq. The country which is today Iraq used to be

called Mesopotamia by the Greeks, and it's that landscape that sometimes you hear about at school

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