A Lecture by

Dr. Irving Finkel

Curator, Department of the Middle East

British Museum, London

The Charles Eliot Norton Memorial Lectureship of the AIA

Monday, October 31, 2016

Whitney Bank Presentation Room

Thomas Hall

8 pm

free admission and free parking on campus (West Road Garage and the Horseshoe)

Co-sponsored by the Office of the Provost, the Department of Classical Studies and the New Orleans Society of the Archaeological Institute of America

This illustrated talk will explain how the belief in demons, witches and ghosts goes back into remote antiquity, and investigate what we know of the miscellaneous invisible troublemakers that Mesopotamian exorcists had to deal with.  We have cuneiform texts (spells and incantations), pictures, amulets and other bits and pieces which allow us to peer back in time through a dark window and see how the Babylonians and Assyrians really understood misfortune and illness and what they did to improve things.  The lecture will be light-hearted and attention-seizing, noisy and unsoporific, and at the same time will endeavour to tackle the interesting process of bringing frightened people who have been dead for three or four thousand years briefly back to life.