Gods, demons, witches and exorcists: inside an ancient Assyrian library

Summary

History Extra Podcast: "Gods, Demons, Witches and Exorcists: Inside an Ancient Assyrian Library"

Release Date: May 15, 2025
Host: Immediate Media
Guest: Dr. Selina Wisnom, expert in the history of ancient Mesopotamia

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Introduction: Exploring Ashurbanipal's Library

In this captivating episode of the History Extra podcast, Dr. Selina Wisnom delves into the depths of the Library of Ashurbanipal, an ancient Assyrian repository of knowledge. Hosted by David Musgrove, the discussion unveils how this extraordinary collection offers profound insights into the religious, social, and political fabric of the Assyrian Empire.

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Ashurbanipal: The Scholar-King of Assyria [02:17 - 04:29]

Dr. Wisnom introduces listeners to Ashurbanipal, a formidable king of the Assyrian Empire during the 7th century BC. Ashurbanipal, whose reign marked the zenith of Assyrian power, was not only a warrior but also a patron of knowledge. His empire stretched from Egypt and Turkey in the west to Iran in the east, with Nineveh, near modern-day Mosul, serving as its capital.

David Musgrove describes Ashurbanipal as "King of Assyria, king of the world," highlighting his ambition and the vastness of his dominion.

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The Library of Ashurbanipal: A Treasure Trove of Mesopotamian Wisdom [06:43 - 09:58]

Ashurbanipal's library was a monumental project aimed at consolidating all the knowledge of Mesopotamia under one roof. The collection encompassed diverse subjects, including poetry, literature, magic, medicine, and rituals. Musgrove emphasizes the library's dual purpose: "It's also a collection that's quite personal to him," noting Ashurbanipal's hands-on involvement through personal letters and educational texts.

Dr. Wisnom explains, "Ashurbanipal makes all kinds of contributions and innovations to that as well," underscoring the king's role in both preserving and advancing Assyrian scholarship.

Notable Quote:
"Ashurbanipal was not just a mighty warrior, but someone who was also trying to collect all of the wisdom of ancient Mesopotamia." ([03:50])

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Religion and the Divine: Understanding the Assyrian Pantheon [10:32 - 14:02]

The library's texts reveal a complex religious system where gods had distinct domains, such as war, plague, scribes, and justice. The Assyrians believed that misfortunes were signs of divine displeasure, necessitating atonement to regain favor.

David Musgrove elaborates, "They have a basic pantheon of gods. People would pray to different gods for the things that they wanted in life." He further explains the concept of "God napping," where enemies would steal a city's patron god to demoralize and weaken it.

Notable Quote:
"If you fall out with your friends, you fall out with your family. If you become really ill, usually it means you are estranged from the gods in some way." ([11:07])

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Demons and the Role of Pazuzu [23:08 - 24:47]

Assyrian mythology featured numerous demons, both malevolent and protective. Pazuzu, often mischaracterized in modern media, was actually seen as a protective demon capable of combating more harmful entities like Lamashtu, who was notorious for harming infants and pregnant women.

David Musgrove clarifies Pazuzu's true role: "He was actually somebody who the exorcist could get on his side to fight against other demons."

Notable Quote:
"Some of the demons seem to be like slithering underneath a door, like a draft. It's very shadowy and insubstantial." ([22:14])

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Life After Death: Assyrian Afterlife Beliefs [24:59 - 27:30]

Assyrians envisioned the afterlife as a shadowy underworld where one’s fate was tied to their lineage. Having numerous children ensured sustenance in the afterlife, as living descendants would continue to offer food and drink to deceased ancestors.

David Musgrove states, "They're feeding the gods vast quantities of food every single day," highlighting the continuous relationship between the living and the dead.

Notable Quote:
"If they didn't do that, they thought that they wouldn't be able to drink and then they would go mad with thirst." ([26:35])

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Exorcism and Magical Practices [18:32 - 22:14]

Exorcists in Assyrian society played a crucial role in mediating between humans and the gods. Their practices involved rituals that resembled legal proceedings, aiming to persuade deities to reverse unfavorable omens or dispel malevolent forces.

David Musgrove compares exorcists to lawyers: "It's his job to persuade them. And a lot of the rituals that he performs are set up a bit like a law court."

Notable Quote:
"He's more like a lawyer than a wizard or a magician or something like that." ([18:56])

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Divination and the Quest for Knowledge [27:39 - 30:34]

Divination was a sophisticated practice in Assyria, involving the interpretation of celestial events, natural anomalies, and sacrificial rituals to predict the future or seek guidance. The process was highly methodical, often involving multiple officials to ensure accuracy and objectivity.

David Musgrove explains, "The Babylonians would look inside a sheep. We don't consider that necessarily any more reliable. But is it actually any more accurate? Not necessarily."

Notable Quote:
"They really do seem to be very sincere in trying to get the right answer." ([29:43])

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Sexuality and Social Norms: Balancing Control and Celebration [30:34 - 33:24]

The library's texts reveal contrasting views on sexuality. While some omens advocated for male self-control and dominance, other texts celebrated sexual expression and joyous unions. This dichotomy suggests a complex societal attitude towards gender roles and sexual behavior.

David Musgrove discusses, "They seem to approve of self-control, as you say. Their omens say that too much ejaculating is terrible for the man."

Notable Quote:
"You're gonna be thirsty all of the time anyway, and then they'll come back to haunt you, which is a disaster." ([26:50])

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The Demise of the Library and Its Legacy [33:24 - 35:33]

Ashurbanipal's library met its end when Nineveh was sacked by the Babylonians in 612 BC. Despite the destruction, many tablets were preserved, allowing future generations to access this wealth of knowledge. Ashurbanipal's legacy as a guardian of culture endured, influencing subsequent scholars and traditions.

David Musgrove notes, "He was known as a scholar. He was known in later tradition for that."

Notable Quote:
"The Babylonians probably did take quite a lot of it back with them to Babylon, because... they've been rifling through it." ([34:20])

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Reflections on Ancient and Modern Perspectives [35:06 - 35:33]

Dr. Wisnom and Musgrove conclude with reflections on how modern society views ancient civilizations. They emphasize the ingenuity and achievements of the Assyrians, urging listeners to appreciate the sophistication of their knowledge systems without projecting contemporary biases.

David Musgrove marvels, "These are people who could predict the movements of any star or planet to an accuracy of 4 minutes on any day... without any instruments except their bare hands."

Notable Quote:
"We're doing similar kinds of things for similar reasons as well. Because human beings hate uncertainty. We'll do anything we can to eliminate that." ([35:06])

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Conclusion

This episode offers a compelling journey into the heart of ancient Assyria, revealing how the Library of Ashurbanipal serves as a window into the civilization's religious practices, social norms, and intellectual pursuits. By understanding the complexities of Assyrian society, listeners gain a deeper appreciation for the enduring legacy of one of history's most influential empires.

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Transcript

[David Musgrove]

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[Dr. Selina Wisnom]

Today we are going to talk about an ancient library and the treasure trove of wisdom it holds within. But if that sounds a bit dry, fear not. Far from it. We're going to hear stories about exorcism, witches, a demon with a snake for his penis, and the sexual self control of an ancient Assyrian king called Ashurbanipal. So let's head into the Library of Ancient Wisdom with Dr. Salina Wisnom. Selina, welcome to the podcast. How are you doing?

[David Musgrove]

Great, thanks. Great to be here.

[Dr. Selina Wisnom]

Good now, it's a delight to have you here. Your book is brilliant. I got the pronunciation right there.

[David Musgrove]

Yeah, Ashurbanipal.

[Dr. Selina Wisnom]

Good. Okay, so tell us about him. Who was he, when was he, where was he, what's he all about?

[David Musgrove]

He was a king of the mighty Assyrian empire in the 7th century BC. He called himself Ashurbanipal, King of Assyria, king of the world. And at that time, it really would have seemed like he was almost king of the whole world, because his empire spanned almost the entire Middle East. He rules over everything from Egypt and Turkey in the west, right over to Iran in the east. And the heartland of his empire is what's now modern day Iraq, as Syria is in northern Iraq. And he was in instrumental in really pushing the boundaries of this empire to its greatest extent. And he had his capital at the city of Nineveh, which is near modern day Mosul. And he was a king who really went after knowledge as well as territory. So he's not just a mighty warrior, but someone who was also trying to collect all of the wisdom of ancient Mesopotamia, which is also just the ancient name, the name that we give to ancient Iraq.

[Dr. Selina Wisnom]

So, yeah, let's just clarify that really quickly. So we talked about Assyria, we've talked about Mesopotamia. Are those two terms broadly interchangeable or should we be using them with any sense of difference?

[David Musgrove]

Not quite. That is a good question. So Assyria is really in the north and Mesopotamia is a general term meaning between the rivers, and that means Tigris and Euphrates rivers and covers more or less what's the whole of modern day Iraq? And it has a very ancient history going right back to the fourth millennium BC and the Assyrian Empire, or at least the part talking about comes right towards the end of that time period with Ashurbanipal and his library being in the seventh century bc.

[Dr. Selina Wisnom]

Yeah, brilliant. So we're right at the end of the Assyrian Empire. And listeners, for a bit of extra context, we have got some interviews in the archive. Check out the episodes with Moody Al Rashid and Paul Collins where we talk more about ancient Mesopotamia and ancient Assyria. So you can get more info there. We'll put links in the show. Notes right back to Ashurbanipal. Was he a nice chap?

[David Musgrove]

Well, that depends. Depends if you are on his right side or not. He presents himself as pretty ruthless. I mean, if you go to his palaces, he would have decorated his palaces with friezes of all the battles that he fought, the people that he conquered. We've got sieges going on people being impaled on stakes. Not the nicest thing. And all of this is calculated to send a message, right, that you do not cross almighty Assyria. And we get the same picture from the text in the library as well. We've got accounts of his military campaigns where he describes all of the territories he's conquered and the battles that he's fought with the gods there on the battlefield on his side.

[Dr. Selina Wisnom]

It sounds like he wasn't a chap you'd want to cross. Now, I reference a story that you talk about in the book where he made a defeated rival king wear a dog collar and guard the gate like a dog.

[David Musgrove]

Yeah.

[Dr. Selina Wisnom]

What's that about?

[David Musgrove]

Yes, fairly standard. Well, it's about, again, really humiliating your enemies and putting them in positions where people can see exactly what happens if you cross someone like Ashurbanipal. There's another relief in his palace where he shows people grinding the bones of their ancestors to be made into bricks to be put into the city itself. So a lot of these punishments are really calculated to display his power over other people.

[Dr. Selina Wisnom]

So, like displays of brutality, which seem slightly at odds with the learning that you might imagine in a library. But let's come to the library. We're Talking about the 7th century BC, just for a bit of context. Britain. We would be in the Iron Age, a time of hill forts, ironworking, mixed farming. But all we know about Britain at the time is derived from archaeology. We don't have any written records, there's no textual accounts there. Here we've got a mass of textual accounts because we have a library. Tell us about the library.

[David Musgrove]

Yes. So the library was Ashurbanipal's project. It was started a bit before him, but he was the one who really made it what it was. And. And he is trying to collect all the knowledge of Mesopotamia here under one roof. It's a kind of attempt to universal knowledge, and it contains all the things that he would need to rule his empire as well. So Mesopotamia has incredible traditions in poetry, literature, magic, medicine, ritual, all of these things. But at the same time, it's very practical as well. So take for example, reading the future. That's a kind of technology to the Assyrians. It's going to be really, really helpful if you're trying to wr an empire of this size. So he would be asking questions like, should I go to war? When should I go to war? Who should I appoint to be the chief of my army? And things like that. So it's also a collection that's quite personal to him. We have got letters written by him in his own hand, not just these diplomatic ones that I mentioned earlier, but even from stages of his own education and training. We've got a letter from Ashurbanipal to his father when he was still very, very young. And the cuneiform writing is really. It's almost like the equivalent of non joined up handwriting where it's really wobbly. We're seeing him take his first steps. We've got everything from that up until really advanced stuff that he was copying too. So we've got glass making recipes, we've got lists of medicinal plants that show that he was studying text at quite an advanced level. And he is the only Assyrian king to claim to do this. Which also gives us some of the background to why did he amass this library to begin with? There is a wonderful inscription we refer to as biography where he talks a little bit about what he did before he came to the throne. And he says that he was trained in all of this esoteric law, that he can read inscriptions that are so old they're from a time before the Great Flood, that he can do advanced mathematics and do calculations that don't come out easily, that he has studied obscure ancient languages and that he can debate these texts with his advisors at the same level as they can. He's the only one who claims to do that. And I think it shows that he probably did actually use this library and it's not just all talk.

[Dr. Selina Wisnom]

Okay, so a practical purpose of the library. You mentioned cuneiform just then. Just tell us a little bit about that and the actual materiality of the documents. Well, they're not documents necessarily, are they, that survive in this library?

[David Musgrove]

Yes. So cuneiform is the writing system that they used in Mesopotamia, invented in the mid 4th millennium BC and used right the way through, although it evolves on the way and it's inscribed on clay tablets. So they make the sign by pressing a wedge into a piece of clay and that makes a three dimensional impression. And what's really amazing about that is it's so durable. The library as we have it survives because it burned down in 612 BC. The Babylonians swarmed upon Nineveh, set fire to the place, and in this great conflagration, the library tablets were actually fired because the heat of the fire, it acts like a giant kiln and makes these tablets even more survivable for us today.

[Dr. Selina Wisnom]

Let's talk about what's actually in some of these sources. So as you've said, the title of your book describes it as this great sort of temple of ancient wisdom. Like loads and loads of stuff in there. And it sounds like there's still an awful lot to learn. Maybe we'll talk about that at the end. But one of the things that seems to really come across is it gives a sense of the sort of religion and religious practices that were being carried out in Assyria, not just in the seventh century, but centuries, millennia before that. Can you give us a little sense about the sort of thing it tells us about, about the gods and the way that the Assyrians looked at the gods?

[David Musgrove]

Yes. So they have a basic pantheon of gods. There are different gods who are responsible for different things. There's a God of war, a God of plague, God of scribes, a God of justice and so on. And people would pray to different gods for the things that they wanted in life. But also, I think what's particularly interesting and different about their culture is that anything that goes wrong in your life is because the gods are angry with you. If you fall out with your friends, you fall out with your family. If you become really ill, usually it means you are estranged from the gods in some way. And so then you have to find out what you've done wrong, you have to atone for it. And we have a lot of prayers from the library which attest to that. And we have ritual texts as well, which is another way that people would try to get the gods on side. And there are all sorts of ways you can offend the gods. Some of them make sense to us, the kind of obvious murder, adultery, lying, stealing. But you could also offend the gods and have no idea what you had done wrong. Some of the things seem really odd to us, like vomiting in a river is apparently a great offence to the gods. But you can also pick up this kind of sin or transgression accidentally. So if you sit in the same chair as somebody who's committed an offence against the gods, you can pick up that guilt yourself. It's a little bit like catching a disease, like we would say today, like microorganisms. The transgression is contagious in that sense, so it's perfectly possible to anger the gods without actually having done anything wrong yourself. And that's when you call an exorcist, whose job it is to come and put it.

[Dr. Selina Wisnom]

All right, we'll come back on to exorcism in just a second. But there's a phrase that I really liked that I wanted you to explain a bit more, which you use in the Book, which is God napping.

[David Musgrove]

Oh, yes.

[Dr. Selina Wisnom]

What do you mean by God napping?

[David Musgrove]

Well, this is when you kidnap the gods of a specific city.

[Dr. Selina Wisnom]

Why would you do that?

[David Musgrove]

Well, it's an offensive on morale. So every city has got its own patron God who they specially worship, and that God is a protector of the city. So if the protector of the city is taken away from the city, that is a disaster, because they would have seen that as the God himself or herself actually abandoning the people. Because why would the gods allow this to happen? Why would the gods allow the enemy to carry off their statue and take it to a foreign land? So it's a way of explaining why bad things have happened to them, but also works the other way around. Right. The enemy really want to do this. They want to take the most sacred possession of the city away because they know how people will feel about it.

[Dr. Selina Wisnom]

So you kind of just then add that God to your pantheon?

[David Musgrove]

Well, not necessarily. I think they keep them captive just to humiliate them, really. But even if sometimes they would be the same gods that they worshipped and they still take them anyway. But it's like saying, we've got them here in our city now and this shows who the God really favours. If they kidnap the statue of Marduk from the city of Babylon, which is his natural home, take it back to Assyria, as the Assyrians did, it's their way of saying, well, we're the ones who have Marduk now.

[Dr. Selina Wisnom]

Okay, so from what you're saying is the gods, at least in the mindset of the ancient Assyrians, are very much active and have agency in the lives of. Of the people living in the cities.

[David Musgrove]

Yes, they really do. And they behave much like human beings do as well. You know, they have strong personalities. They can be persuaded, they can be tricked. So they are. They're very active in that sense, too. They do things, they care, they intervene. And people are really trying to get their attention and call them over to their side.

[Dr. Selina Wisnom]

Okay. And that's all captured in the sort of text that we can see in the library. So how do we see that? What sort of ways can we understand that is personal letters, but what else?

[David Musgrove]

Well, they're prayers. We can see the words that people are uttering to the gods when they are in trouble. A lot of it also comes across in the mythology, in the poetic texts and the literature that we have, which describe the kinds of things the gods are doing. And there are the ritual texts as well. So the things where we can see people appealing to the gods specifically trying to change their minds and saying, well, take pity on us and change this. Change this verdict to do something else. You chose to hit play on this podcast today. Smart Choice Progressive loves to help people make smart choices. That's why they offer a tool called Auto Quote Explorer that allows you to compare your Progressive car insurance quote with rates from other companies so you save time on the research and can enjoy savings when you choose the best rate for you. Give it a try after this [e-mail] Progressive Casualty Insurance Company and affiliates not available in all states or situations. Prices vary based on how you buy. If you've shopped online, chances are you've bought from a business Powered by Shopify. You know that purple shop pay button you see at checkout? The one that makes buying so incredibly easy? That's Shopify. And there's a reason so many businesses sell with it. Because Shopify makes it incredibly easy to start and run your business. Shopify is the commerce platform behind 10% of all e commerce in the US Sign up for your $1 per month trial and start sell selling today at shopify.com promo Go to shopify.com promo Gentlemen.

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[David Musgrove]

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[Dr. Selina Wisnom]

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[David Musgrove]

Same sort of level the king does? Because everyone, as well as the basic pantheon of gods that everyone worships, they've got their own personal God or goddess as well. And the personal God of the king of Assyria is the God Asshur himself. The God Asshur is the state God of Assyria. Assyria is actually named after him. So Assyria in their language is just the land of Asshur, one of the main capital cities. Asshur is just the city of Asshur. So he is really synonymous with the power of Assyria itself. And it's the king's job to, well, keep Ashur happy, keep the other gods happy. He's high priest of all of the temples in his country and it is his job to make sure that they are okay the temples are running that people are getting their offerings. People. Well, the gods. The gods are getting their offerings. And if they don't, he will hear about it because they also believe that the gods are constantly sending the king messages through the form of different omens, particularly astrological omens. So things going on in the sky are the God's way of communicating to the Assyrian king. There will be a plague, or there's going to be a drought, or the enemy are going to invade. And all of this is seen as a kind of divine commentary on the king's reign. He's being told, are you doing a good job or not?

[Dr. Selina Wisnom]

Okay, so you need to keep an eye on the sky. What sort of offerings would you make to placate a God?

[David Musgrove]

You feed them a lot of meat, a lot of expensive meat, but also different types of beer. They like variety in that. All sorts, different types of bread, cakes, fish, poultry, you name it, everything. They are feeding the gods vast quantities of food every single day. And the gods have four meals a day as well. And so they really do. The whole temple is geared towards producing this food so that it can be delivered to the gods. And they'll go and place it on the table before the statue of the God every single day. Almost as if the statue of the God is like a person, is like an embodiment of the God himself.

[Dr. Selina Wisnom]

Okay, so the gods were well fed.

[David Musgrove]

Hungry, hungry gods.

[Dr. Selina Wisnom]

Exorcism. You mentioned exorcism earlier. Why would you do that and how would that work?

[David Musgrove]

Well, the word that we translate as exorcist actually means a lot of other things. It's much broader than this. Right. So an exorcist is really a professional magic worker, and he's the one whose job it is to intervene when the gods are angry. So he will conduct all of these purification rituals, these rituals, which are aiming for people to tell the gods that they're sorry, to get the gods to change their minds.

[Dr. Selina Wisnom]

And.

[David Musgrove]

And actually, in that sense, what he's doing, he's more like a lawyer than a wizard or a magician or something like that, because it's his job to persuade them. And a lot of the rituals that he performs are set up a bit like a law court where he's asking us, change your mind, change your verdict. And he's pleading on behalf of his client, even. And that legal metaphor is something that they're very conscious of when they are setting these things up. And he uses magic to do this. And magic, in this sense is. Is a way of getting the Gods to lend power to your actions. None of it works if the gods don't agree, it doesn't really depend on the power of the Exorcist himself. His power is all channeled through. Is Marduk going to agree with this? You know, is this other God going to help me out here? And they do things that look magical to us. Like they make figurines. They might burn a figurine of a witch. If they want to destroy a witch, they might cast magic circles of flower, and they even carry sticks that might look a bit to us like a magic wand. So they have got all of that paraphernalia as well. But what really matters is that they're persuading the gods to help them achieve what they want to achieve.

[Dr. Selina Wisnom]

Okay, so there was a big performative element to what they were doing.

[David Musgrove]

Definitely.

[Dr. Selina Wisnom]

Did you just say they had wands? Is that right?

[David Musgrove]

Well, then maybe they have an eru stick, which is a wooden staff of some kind, which, you know, maybe it's a kind of connected concept to the idea of a magic wand, even if it's used in a very different way.

[Dr. Selina Wisnom]

But they weren't pulling rabbits out of hats.

[David Musgrove]

No, definitely not that kind of magician.

[Dr. Selina Wisnom]

Okay. Serious people.

[David Musgrove]

Deadly serious.

[Dr. Selina Wisnom]

You mentioned witches just then. Where do witches come into this story?

[David Musgrove]

Well, it's also the exorcist's job to battle against witchcraft. In the book, I talk about how the king's Martha was very seriously ill and they diagnosed witchcraft as the cause of that. And witchcraft is a. Is actually a diagnosable disease like anything else, strangely enough. Right. You don't really get witch crazes in Mesopotamia where people go around accusing all sorts of people for anything that's gone wrong in their lives. You accuse the gods of that, but there's very specific symptoms. Like she'd lost a lot of weight, maybe dizziness, vertigo, feeling depressed, trembling, ringing in the ears. These kinds of things might be a sign that, aha, it's a witch who has bewitched you. So there are all of these rituals that you can go through to try to cure the witchcraft. And it's essentially a way of sending the magic back to the witch who had sent it to you. And they're trying to redirect it all. And I describe that ritual in detail in the book.

[Dr. Selina Wisnom]

So witches would have been real people. They would have been identifiable Personas in the city.

[David Musgrove]

Yeah, we don't really have that many documents that talk about real people as witches. And the way that the texts are phrased are very, very General. So, you know, we know there's a witch out there. We don't know who it is. That doesn't really matter. They say, you know, my witch or my warlock, you know who. Whoever you are, if you're this person, that person, the other person. But all very general terms, not naming people by names, but they're just trying to spread the net as wide as possible to catch whoever it might be. It doesn't really matter who it is. Actually. You can still perform these rituals anyway. And because you're asking the gods to help out, the gods will know and the gods will direct it to where it needs to go.

[Dr. Selina Wisnom]

Could exorcists also do stuff against demons?

[David Musgrove]

Oh, yes. They do also do the traditional job of casting out demons. That is very true. There is a particular demon called the Alu demon which seems to be hanging around the Assyrian palace because this. Well, this king we mentioned earlier, Sennacherib, he was apparently afflicted by it made him really depressed. His advisors didn't want to go anywhere near him. They were scared to tell him bad news when the Alu demon came. And they write about that later on. And, I mean, there's so many demons in Mesopotamia. We know more than a hundred of them by name. And there's even a, you know, gigantic ritual text about getting rid of all these demons. It says in the census of heaven and earth, they cannot be counted. There are just so many of them. So that's. Yeah, that's a big part of what he's doing.

[Dr. Selina Wisnom]

So can we get from the text a sense of what they actually imagined these demons to be? These were presumably supernatural entities that didn't exist in any reality.

[David Musgrove]

Yeah, most of the time they don't know what they look like and they describe them as like, slithering underneath a door, like a draft. It's very shadowy and insubstantial and like, very, very harlo to actually visualize. But there are a couple who are. Who are depicted in art and who are quite colourful. You mentioned Pazuzu at the beginning.

[Dr. Selina Wisnom]

Tell us about Pazuzu and the curious genitals.

[David Musgrove]

Yeah. Pazuzu is king of the wind demons. He has got dog's jaws, bulging eyes, you know, his tongue's hanging out, he's got human ears, quite creepily, a penis which looks like a snake. Wasted body from starvation. Really quite terrifying to look at. And he's especially famous today because he crops up in the film the Exorcist, which starts at a site in Iraq, and then we see this statue of him and it's implied that he's the one who's been possessing this 12 year old American girl. But actually Pazuzu was friendly. It was one of the great misconceptions about Mesopotamian demons. He was actually somebody who the exorcist could get on his side to fight against other demons. So one of the most famous depictions we've got of Pazuzu is from a really big amulet which is against a different demon called Lamashtu. And Lamashtu was particularly famed for snatching babies. So she'd attack pregnant women, young children. She was an explanation for infant mortality, basically. And we've got Pazuzu is like peering over the edge of a wall, looking down at Lamashtu, because he was the one who would scare her away.

[Dr. Selina Wisnom]

Right, okay. So you shouldn't judge a book by a cover. Even though he looks scary, he was actually a nice guy.

[David Musgrove]

Scary things can be useful, right. As Ashurbanapal himself also knew.

[Dr. Selina Wisnom]

Do we get a sense from what we see in the library of what they thought happened to them after they had died, their sense of the afterlife?

[David Musgrove]

Yeah, they do have depictions of a very shadowy underworld. So there's a great poem called the Descent of Ishtar to the Netherworld, which opens with a description of it saying, it's incredibly dark, incredibly quiet, it's so still that there's dust gathering on the doorbolts because there's no movement at all. And in that poem we see dead people flitting around with garments of wings, as they say. And also the Epic of Gilgamesh shows us a little bit about how people fared in the afterlife. And it really all depends on how many children you have, because after death, people would normally bury their ancestors underneath the floor of their own house and they would make offerings to them, so you would continually feed them and they actually would stick a pipe into the ground and pour beer down it because it was so important to quench the thirst of the ancestors. And if they didn't do that, they thought that they wouldn't be able to drink and then they would go mad with thirst. Especially thinking of how hot it is in Iraq. Right. You're going to be thirsty all of the time anyway, and then they'll come back to haunt you, which is a disaster. And the Epic of Gilgamesh has got a great bit at the end where Gilgamesh's friend Enkidu, he goes to the netherworld and he comes back and he reports what it's like there. And he actually tells us that this is what happens. You know, the man who had many, many sons, he was fine. He was drinking pure, clear water on the bed of the gods, and he's all right. And the one who has no sons, or he's, like, foraging like a beggar for scraps in the street or even worse.

[Dr. Selina Wisnom]

So the reason that you do well in the afterlife, if you've got lots of children, is because they are there to feed you.

[David Musgrove]

They are there to feed you and keep you going. Exactly. That's what it's all about. Wow.

[Dr. Selina Wisnom]

Okay. So there's no sense that you have to have done, like, good deeds in life or anything. It's just having lots of children to down a pipe.

[David Musgrove]

Yeah, yeah.

[Dr. Selina Wisnom]

So that's very interesting. You talked about ghosts. So there were ghosts as well?

[David Musgrove]

Oh, yeah, definitely ghosts.

[Dr. Selina Wisnom]

What were the ghosts doing?

[David Musgrove]

Well, causing disease, for one thing. So lots of diseases are apparently because of the ghosts of people who died in very specific ways. The person who fell off the roof might come back and cause something. The person who died in a fire might come back and cause a different kind of. So not just not feeding them is something to worry about. But there is also a story of a royal woman who came back as a ghost to confirm the kingship of Ashurbanipal. So when he's named crown prince, she apparently comes back from the dead and appears to somebody in a dream, I think, and lends her support to this. So ghosts could be friendly as well.

[Dr. Selina Wisnom]

Okay, Right. That's a really good overview of the sort of religious mindset that these people had. Are we talking religion? Is that the right word to use? Yeah, yeah. Is that okay?

[David Musgrove]

That's fine.

[Dr. Selina Wisnom]

You mentioned earlier a bit about divination and thinking about the future. How did they do that? How did they try and work out what was going to happen?

[David Musgrove]

So many ways. I mean, Mesopotamia is famous in antiquity in other cultures as well, for being, like, the home of all of these esoteric arts, because they just had such a large literature on it. So I mentioned briefly earlier astrology that is invented in Mesopotamia. The idea that you can look at the stars and see what that's going to mean for the country or for the individual, because later on, they also invent horoscopes and apply that to the fortunes of individual people. But anything unusual happening either in heaven or on earth could be taken as an omen. So anything weird, like a date palm growing out of season, that could mean something. If you've got pigs dancing in the city square, that's pretty weird. That's going to mean something. If a lizard falls from the ceiling onto your right foot, that's going to mean something. So anything unsettling that can happen in the everyday as well as the grand canvas of the heavens could have meaning either for the individual or for the state, but they go even further than that. There are all sorts of ways that you can ask the gods specific questions. If something you really want to know the answer to, like, you know, my mother is ill. Is she going to live or is she going to die? Or, you know, will this business venture be successful? You could put a question directly to the gods by sacrificing a sheep. One of the weirdest of all Assyrian practices from our point of view, but one of the most important to them because it gives them that chance to directly approach the gods, and they believe that the gods will write the answer to your question on the entrails of the sheep at the moment you ask the question, and then the specialist divider will open it up, take a look at what's inside, and they have a very, very sophisticated and complex way of decoding what that answer will be, and they can tell you yes or no.

[Dr. Selina Wisnom]

So you must have had a fair bit of power being an influential figure if you were one of those diviners, one of those people who could work out whatever the God was trying to say, you know, as some sort of channel of intercession, I guess.

[David Musgrove]

Yeah, it would have been a very special position to have. But at the same time, they really do seem to be very sincere in trying to get the right answer. There's no sense, for instance, that they might be just telling the king what he wants to hear or trying to manipulate him towards a specific answer. It's one of the forms of Babylonian divination that is actually, you could even say peer reviewed because it's gotta be checked by someone else. There's never just one person in the royal court anyway who's doing this. There's gonna be someone else there who's writing down the results and who'll be checking what they're doing for really, really important questions. You might have up to 11 different people who are all there checking that it's right. And the way the whole system operates is designed to try to be as objective as possible. There are so many different variables, so many different things to look at, and it's very, very precise, the way the texts are worded.

[Dr. Selina Wisnom]

We're rattling through stuff. And there's one thing that I mention in the top of the interview that I really need to get into. Which is a bit different to any of this, but let's do it. You think that there's information in the library, or there is information in the library that tells us about the sex life or the self control, sexual self control of Ashurbanipal. What do we know about that?

[David Musgrove]

Well, it actually does follow on quite well from what we were talking about.

[Dr. Selina Wisnom]

Before, because we've asked a good question.

[David Musgrove]

Yeah, It's a series of omens that tell us about sexual behavior and tell us about what it means if people do certain things or don't do certain things. And I mean, it gets quite complicated because we can ask, do they really mean this, or is it actually an inversion of the norms that they normally think? But the basic picture presented here is that men should be active and women should be passive. So women taking the initiative in any way at all is awful for the man. You know, like if she touches herself in front of him, it's terrible. She shouldn't be doing that. It's gonna mean bad luck for the. And in fact, the best thing you can do is not to have sex at all with a woman. One of the omens says that if a man is lying on a bed and he is talking with the woman, talking being a euphemism, but actually he doesn't have sex with her, he gets up, he goes away and masturbates, then that's the best thing he can possibly do. So they seem to approve of self control, as you say. Their omens say that too much ejaculating is terrible for the man. Little bit's fine. It's all about finding the happy medium, apparently, and all about the man being in control of the woman as well as of himself. But when I say, did people actually believe that, that's where it gets really interesting. Because there are all kinds of other texts which describe sexuality as extremely positive thing and a joyful thing and a celebrated thing, and where women are perfectly allowed to take the initiative and do whatever they like. And that's something that's praised. And when you look at medical texts in the library, they also give you a different picture. Right. Because there are lots of treatments for impotence, for instance, this is another opportunity for the exorcist to get involved, by the way. He would make house visits to help the couple set up a little ritual and then go away and leave them to it. But yeah, incantations where women are involved and women are speaking these things, speaking to the men, and they give us a great insight into what it Means to talk dirty in Assyria as well, because, you know, they really have. They have the metaphors, they have the poetic imagery. One text even describes tying a goat up next to the bed so that the man can borrow its qualities for inspiration. All kinds of stuff. It's another one of those things which you never expect to find in a library like this or in texts that are so old, but there it is.

[Dr. Selina Wisnom]

Heavens. That sounds quite off putting having a goat.

[David Musgrove]

Well, yeah, each to their own, I guess.

[Dr. Selina Wisnom]

Okay, we need to wrap up, but I want to find out what happened to Ashurbanipal. So his library that was burnt after he died, what happened to him? Did he die in a blaze of glory?

[David Musgrove]

We don't actually know. I mean, for ages people were even arguing about when is the end date of his reign, because the records just seem to peter out. So, yeah, I mean, we just don't know what happened to him at the very end. But his library clearly was an achievement that lived on long after him. Even though the library itself burned down. He was known as a scholar. He was known in later tradition for that. There are letters that he wrote commissioning people to go and collect all of the knowledge that is written in the temple of the God of scribes in these cities in Iraq, which are copied. 500 years after his death. He actually becomes a kind of textbook figure for the preservation of cuneiform culture. Cause school kids are copying this stuff out and they know Ashurbanipal as the guy with the library.

[Dr. Selina Wisnom]

Was there much gnashing of teeth when the library actually was burnt? That was part of a violent reconquest by Babylon. But. But were people upset that this great repository of knowledge had been lost?

[David Musgrove]

We don't know, actually. We don't hear anything about that. The Babylonians probably did take quite a lot of it back with them to Babylon, because, I mean, the way that the tablets were found is, you know, just chucked in a corner in that chamber that we mentioned before. Right. It's not actually on the shelves. They've been rifling through it. They take back some of the important stuff with them. Probably more recent military intelligence, like the correspondence. The more recent correspondence of Ashurbanipal is not there at all, which is why we think maybe it's been taken for political purposes. But the Babylonians had their own libraries as well. Babylon is the great cultural center of the near east, where a lot of this stuff came from originally. And the Assyrians make all kinds of contributions and innovations to that as well. The Babylonians also Quite happy doing their own thing, I think.

[Dr. Selina Wisnom]

Now, I've tried not to be flippant in the conversation. I hope I haven't been flippant about the way we approach this. But it's quite easy to fall into mocking here because. Because it's so weird and so alien to what we know today. But you've got some interesting reflections on that in the book. In terms of how we ought not to feel superior to these people just by dint of the fact that we are centuries away from them. How do you reflect on that? How should we see these people in the way that they saw their world?

[David Musgrove]

Well, first of all, I think, yeah, we think that we're great because we have electricity and the Internet and so on. And yeah, we obviously have achieved a lot technologically. But when you think about what these people could do without any of that technology, I think it's absolutely staggering. I mean, these people could predict the movements of any star or planet to an accuracy of 4 minutes on any day, past or present or future. And they had no instruments except their bare hands to measure the sky. That's incredible. These are people who are fluent in two dead languages by the time we get to the very latest parts of Kunefon culture. And they are guardians of knowledge stretching back a thousand years before them. These are people who are abstract thinkers. You know, they're thinking about, what does it mean if things that are impossible could actually be possible even. And they're also empirical scientists. Their medical texts are based on very, very empirical evidence of what they see with their own eyes at the same time. So I think actually when you think about what they did accomplish, it's incredible and we should be in awe of that. And it should make us also look at ourselves and our own assumptions about our knowledge and the way things work. Because I think when you dig into the mindset behind it and you adopt their perspective, you can see. Well, actually, with what they knew, it did kind of make sense. And some of the things we do seem rational to us. But again, if you dig into it, it maybe makes a little bit less sense. My favorite example with this is with election forecasting, which is something I think the Babylonians would be much better at than we are. We spend incredible amounts of money on opinion polls using complex formulas, complicated systems, experts who've trained for years and years, and they're out trying to get this right and they're often completely wrong. Right. Okay. The Babylonians would look inside a sheep. We don't consider that necessarily any more reliable. But is it actually any more accurate? Not necessarily. And when you look at the impulse behind it, we're doing similar kinds of things, and we're doing similar things for similar reasons as well. Because human beings hate uncertainty. We'll do anything we can to eliminate that, and we just want to know the answer. You know, especially in moments of anxiety or stress or, you know, turbulent world events, they will look inside a sheep. But ultimately it comes from the same place that was. Dr. Selina Wisnom, author of the Library of Ancient Wisdom, Mesopotamia and the Making of History. Selena is also lecturer in the Heritage of the Middle east at the University of Leicester. Thanks for listening. This podcast was produced by Daniel Kramer Arden.