More than four millennia before modern Halloween folklore took shape, the world’s earliest urban civilisations were already gripped by a profound terror of malevolent sorcery, archaeological records reveal.
Tracing ancient cuneiform tablets from Mesopotamia—encompassing regions of modern-day Iraq and Syria—historians have identified evidence showing that civic panic surrounding practitioners of the dark arts stretches back at least 4,000 years. As The Conversation AU reported, surviving texts detail elaborate accounts of formidable figures, including a fabled wise woman whose supernatural gifts purportedly enabled her to transfigure humble fish eggs into fearsome beasts.
Terrors along the Tigris and Euphrates
In ancient Sumer and Babylonia, the division between state-sanctioned religion and illicit occultism was strictly enforced. While recognised priests, priestesses, and diviners operated within temple complexes to appease the pantheon, self-styled witches worked outside these official civic boundaries, drawing deep suspicion from citizens and monarchs alike.
Witches—frequently, though not exclusively, depicted as marginal women—were held responsible for an array of afflictions, including sudden sickness, domestic misfortune, and agricultural failure. The ancient Mesopotamians inhabited a precarious world governed by fickle deities; when unexpected disaster struck, vulnerable citizens routinely suspected neighbours of employing covert incantations to bring about their ruin.
Curses, clay figurines and midnight counter-spells
The depth of this societal anxiety is preserved in ceremonial texts such as Maqlû, meaning “burning”, a monumental Babylonian ritual compilation designed specifically to neutralise black magic. Over nine clay tablets, the text prescribes extensive countermeasures, including the crafting of wax or clay effigies representing the suspected witch. These figurines were systematically burnt or melted during nocturnal rites to dismantle the curse and restore balance to the victim.
The Conversation AU noted that Mesopotamian literature also recorded vivid mythological traditions, including tales of sorcery that inverted the natural order, such as incantations capable of turning fish roe into prowling predators. These accounts operated as stern social warnings regarding those thought capable of manipulating primordial chaos.
Accusations of sorcery carried severe penalties under early legal frameworks. King Hammurabi’s renowned Babylonian legal code, inscribed in the 18th century BCE, mandated that an individual accused of casting a fatal spell had to undergo a river ordeal: surviving the treacherous waters established innocence, while drowning was accepted as proof of guilt.
The enduring archetype of the supernatural outsider
Scholars suggest the Mesopotamian tablets provide a telling window into how human communities manufacture scapegoats during times of distress. The archetypal witch provided an identifiable culprit for conditions that baffled early physicians, as well as unpredictable climatic shifts across the Fertile Crescent.
Long before the witch crazes of early modern Europe, the template of the supernatural outcast—an isolated figure living at society’s edges, accused of bending nature to torment others—was already firmly entrenched. The deciphered cuneiform tablets demonstrate that humanity’s impulse to explain personal suffering through fear of unseen malevolence remains one of civilisation’s oldest cultural legacies.
