Dr Selena Wisnom: Give away your worries, like an ancient Mesopotamian

What can we learn about managing worrying from the people of ancient Assyria and Babylonia? Dr Selena Wisnom offers some Near Eastern wisdom to Dave Musgrove

“Even the king of Assyria admitted to feeling rubbish, something we can all relate to,” says Dr Selena Wisnom. Illustration by Kate Hazell, katehazell.com

Do you worry about things? Do you wake up in the middle of the night, sweating about what might happen to you, to your family, to the world in general? I do. If you do too, rest assured you’re not alone. It’s a natural human trait, and it’s something people have been doing for millennia. In evolutionary terms, I imagine it’s something to do with forcing our minds to think about the things we ought to be doing next to keep ourselves alive, and keep us out of dangerous situations. It’s counterproductive, of course, to worry yourself into a state of paralysis – that’s when worrying goes wrong. Are there any lessons we can take from history that can help us worry productively?

I went to the Assyria Galleries in the British Museum late one Friday afternoon to reflect on this. They are well worth a visit, whether you’re a worrier or not. Turn left at the main entrance and you’re straight into them. I wanted to go there because Dr Selena Wisnom, an expert on the history and heritage of ancient Mesopotamia and author of the excellent new book The Library of Ancient Wisdom (Penguin, 2025), had told me these people were worriers of renown: “They worry so much that they invent an entire branch of scholarship devoted to it. This is worrying on a kind of national cosmic scale.”

Dr Selena Wisnom is an expert on the history and heritage of ancient Mesopotamia

This organised worrying was called ‘lamentation’. It wasn’t just a private matter – it was ritualised, institutionalised and shared across the whole society.

We know they worried and lamented because they wrote about it. I wanted to get up close and personal with some ancient Mesopotamian cuneiform script. There is a lot of cuneiform script on display in the British Museum. I can’t read it – and there aren’t many people who can – but I figured it would be instructive just to look at it, and think a bit about the people who carved it.

An Assyrian bronze relief from the gates of Shalmaneser III (858–824 BC) from Balawat, depicting a sacrificial bull and ram. Image: Getty

Hands and minds of the Mesopotamians

Cuneiform is the writing system that they used in Mesopotamia. It was invented in the mid-fourth millennium BC and used for millennia afterwards, although it evolved on the way. It was basically a system of signs inscribed on clay tablets, produced by pressing a wedge into a piece of clay to make a three-dimensional impression. So when you’re looking at a cuneiform inscription, you’re looking at the hands and minds of the people who made them.

By studying those cuneiform writings, Assyriologists like Wisnom have been able to understand a great deal about life in ancient Mesopotamia, and research how these people saw their world. It was a world, as Wisnom explained to me, that was full of worry and worriers.

The Tablet of Shamash, or The Sun God Tablet, from ancient Babylonia includes cuneiform writing and is on display at the British Museum. Image: Alamy

Let’s take a moment for a quick recap on where and when we’re talking about. Mesopotamia is a geographical term – it means between the rivers, and the rivers in question are the Tigris and Euphrates, so broadly where modern Iraq, north-east Syria and part of south-east Turkey are today. Mesopotamia was a focus for ancient civilisations from the fourth millennium BC onwards and Assyria and Babylonia were two of those civilisations, Assyria to the north and Babylonia to the south. Relations between these two kingdoms in the first millennium BC were, in Wisnom’s words, “tense”. Her book focuses on the time of the last great Assyrian king, Ashurbanipal, who reigned in the mid-seventh century BC from his splendid capital at Nineveh. His brother was king of Babylon, and as is so often the way, the siblings fell out and went to war. The upshot was an Assyrian victory over Babylon. However, a few decades after Ashurbanipal’s death, revenge was served when the Babylonians and their allies descended on Nineveh and reduced this mighty city to rubble in 612 BC. Its remains are now to be found on the outskirts of Mosul.

Why burning a library was good news for historians

The destruction of Nineveh included the burning of the great library of Ashurbanipal – the library of ancient wisdom in Wisnom’s book title. You might imagine that a raging fire in a great library would be a Very Bad Thing for later historians. However, because the ancient Mesopotamians used clay tablets, the conflagration acted like a giant kiln and fired the tablets, making them more likely to survive for posterity. Crushed and forgotten though these tablets were, their subsequent rediscovery in the 19th century provides a huge source of material for us to understand how these people saw the world around them. Quite a lot of the writings in Ashurbanipal’s library have found their way to the British Museum, along with reliefs, sculptures and statues as well.

And that’s how we know what the Babylonians and the Assyrians worried about, and how they coped with these worries.

To understand the central role of worry in ancient Mesopotamia, you’ve got to appreciate the scale and sophistication of these civilisations. Assyria was one of the great powers of the ancient world, known for its military strength, monumental architecture and extensive bureaucracy.

The Babylonians were renowned for their scholarship and cosmopolitan culture. Babylon became a centre of religious ritual, law and intellectual life. Assyrian and Babylonian fortunes rose and fell turn-by-turn over the centuries. As Wisnom notes in her book, “Assyrian culture owes so much to the Babylonians that the two can be difficult to disentangle.” She likes to use the term Mesopotamian to refer to aspects of their culture that are shared, as well as relating to earlier Sumerian texts. “They were guardians of knowledge stretching back a thousand years before them,” she says, inheriting and preserving earlier Sumerian and Akkadian traditions.

Flood, fire, famine and fear

This long historical memory brought with it an equally enduring awareness of the risk of natural disaster. Flood, fire and famine were things they knew and feared. They also knew that the way to avoid catastrophe was to keep their gods happy. They had a pantheon of gods who were active in daily life. Mesopotamian gods, says Wisnom, “behave much like human beings do… they have strong personalities, they can be persuaded, they can be tricked. They do things, they care, they intervene, and people are really trying to get their attention and call them over to their side.”

“They had ways to address it,” says Wisnom. “They had prayers. They had rituals. They might go to the exorcist to help them go through a very elaborate procedure where they give voice to all of that and express it.”

In a society where fear of the gods was interwoven with daily life, ritualised expressions of worry were not eccentric – they were essential. I don’t want to give you the impression that these people were superstitious bumpkins though. These were advanced societies – pioneers of writing, architecture, mathematics, and astronomy – but their cultural sophistication did not free them from fear. Quite the opposite.

Lament, and let the Gods know you’re there

They believed the world was sustained by divine order, and that disorder – famine, floods, illness, invasion – meant that something had gone wrong in the human relationship with the gods. Misfortune wasn’t random: it was a message.

And so they acted, regularly and ritually, to express their anxieties and try to restore divine favour. “They lament to the gods in the temples every single day,” says Wisnom. “They have people whose job it is to sing in front of the gods four times a day, these very, very long litanies, bewailing all of the potential things that could go wrong to the city.”

These professional lamenters were essentially state-appointed national worriers. Their job was to imagine worst-case scenarios in elaborate poetic form, and recite them in public ceremonies, even when no immediate crisis was at hand. “If you make it clear to the gods that you know they could do all these terrible things to you,” says Wisnom, “then they won’t feel the need to do it.”

It was an act of pre-emptive humility – ritualised worrying in the hope of divine mercy.

In order to know what you need the gods to do on your behalf in the future, you need to know what’s coming your way. One of the ways the Assyrians and Babylonians dealt with their worries about the future was by attempting to predict it. They developed highly sophisticated systems of divination, which were treated not as superstition but as a vital form of scholarship. Their premise was simple but profound: if misfortune is a message from the gods, it must be possible to read the signs in advance.

This approach took many forms. Celestial omens were especially important. The movement of stars and planets, eclipses, and unusual celestial events were meticulously recorded and interpreted. The Assyrians and Babylonians were very proficient at studying the stars. Wisnom notes that Mesopotamian astronomers could “predict the movements of any star or planet to an accuracy of four minutes on any day, past or future,” using only naked-eye observations and mathematical ingenuity.

These professional lamenters were essentially state-appointed national worriers. Their job was to imagine worst-case scenarios in poetic form, and recite them in public ceremonies

The wisdom of sheep entrails

But divination didn’t stop at the sky. The Assyrians also practised extispicy – the reading of entrails – as a means of answering specific questions posed to the gods. “It was one of the most important ways for kings to receive divine guidance,” says Wisnom. Priests would sacrifice a sheep, examine its liver and other organs, and interpret the shape, texture, and marks according to detailed manuals. The process was collaborative, peer-reviewed and surprisingly scientific in its approach.

Other forms of divination included dream interpretation, reading smoke patterns, and interpreting odd occurrences in the natural world – like a pig dancing in a town square or a goat giving birth to a two-headed kid. Any anomaly might hold a message.

I’m reading this as a response to uncertainty. I’ve locked in my mortgage rate because I didn’t know if the interest rate was going to spiral upwards, so I’ve listened to the predictions of financial experts and acted accordingly. That means I don’t need to worry about it because I actually can’t do anything about it. If you believe that you can get divine guidance from the stars or a sheep’s liver, then you too can get certainty about the future, and I guess, reduce anxiety. Managed risk it’s called, I think.

The people in Nineveh and other cities across the Mesopotamian world had a lot to worry about. Their world was full of unseen dangers. They had demons, witches and ghosts to contend with. Malevolent forces could afflict individuals or communities, and their symptoms – physical, mental or social – had to be interpreted and treated.

Demons were blamed for sleeplessness and depression. Others, like Lamashtu, threatened pregnant women and infants. Even King Ashurbanipal’s grandfather Sennacherib was said to have been afflicted by a demon that left him “so miserable his advisors were afraid to speak to him”.

Lamashtu was seen as the most terrible of female demons in Mesopotamian mythology, threatening pregnant women, and children. Image: Alamy

Witchcraft, too, was taken seriously. If someone suffered from unexplained weight loss, dizziness, or persistent anxiety, a diagnosis of witchcraft might follow. “Witchcraft is actually a diagnosable disease like anything else,” says Dr Wisnom.

Treatment came through rituals. Figurines were made and destroyed; incantations were recited; offerings were made to the gods. Exorcists – far from being theatrical performers – were highly trained specialists who used a combination of ritual, medical knowledge and divine petition to help patients. “The exorcist is more like a lawyer than a magician,” Wisnom explains. “He pleads with the gods to change their verdict.”

Putting worries in a pot

I suppose the point is that these people didn’t worry in silence. They worried very publicly, loudly and regularly. Anxiety was given a voice, a schedule and, often, a proxy. “They assigned worrying to professionals and fixed times of day,” Wisnom notes. “It’s not actually that different from what the NHS suggests that we do.”

The NHS’s Every Mind Matters platform offers guidance on how to manage persistent worry using self-help CBT techniques. These include identifying whether a worry is hypothetical or practical, writing worries down to gain distance from them, and allocating a set time each day to process them – techniques that echo the Assyrian practice of ritualising anxiety through structured lamentation. As the NHS explains, “If you find that you’re constantly worrying, it can help to give yourself a set time to do it – and then let those worries go the rest of the day.”

I’m thinking that the ancient Mesopotamians would likely have approved.

There was also no shame in acknowledging emotional distress. Letters from royal scholars, priests and even kings include candid confessions of despair, hopelessness and guilt. Ashurbanipal himself once wrote: “I did absolutely everything right… and yet still I’m constantly depressed.”

An Assyrian statue of Ashurbanipal from his royal palace in Nineveh. He once wrote: “I did absolutely everything right… and yet still I’m constantly depressed.” Image: Alamy

Not so distant, not so weird

If the scale and solemnity of Mesopotamian lamentation sounds distant and weird, hang on for a second to consider how we’ve reacted to disaster and threat in Britain in recent times. I’m reminded of an article that Professor Natalie Mears, a historian of early modern Britain, wrote for BBC History Magazine a few years ago about national days of prayer in Britain (if you’re a HistoryExtra member, you can read it in full here now). She notes that since 1535, there have been more than 500 such occasions in England and Wales alone. These were not mere religious observances – they were formal, state-sanctioned rituals in response to national anxiety.

“There seem to have been two principal motivations for the country to come together in prayer: to seek God’s help in secular affairs, and to offer thanks for his intervention,” says Mears.

So Charles II, in 1666, ordered a “day of solemn fasting and humiliation” after the Great Fire devastated the capital. But there were also days of thanksgiving when the nation had been delivered from disaster, such as after Trafalgar and Waterloo in the early 19th century.

More recently, in May 1940, just days after becoming prime minister, Winston Churchill approved a national day of prayer in response to the crisis unfolding in France. “People throughout Britain flocked to their local churches and chapels,” Mears writes. When news broke of the Dunkirk evacuation’s success five days later, many saw it as divine deliverance.

Workers at an aircraft factory pray during a service on the national day of prayer on 3 September 1942. Image: Getty

How different is this national prayer for deliverance, and humiliation before God, from ancient Mesopotamian lamentation? Seems pretty similar to me. Would it even be going too far to suggest that the banging of pots and pans outside during Covid was the latest iteration of lamentation and thanksgiving in a more secular Britain? Were we trying to hammer away our worries about the pandemic, as much as say thanks to the NHS and first responders?

Gods, demons and algorithms

The Assyrian and Babylonian response to anxiety was, in many ways, deeply pragmatic. It acknowledged fear as part of life, and sought to engage with it openly and communally. There were specialists to diagnose it, rituals to manage it, and no expectation that individuals should bear it alone.

Their world may have been filled with gods and demons rather than algorithms and economic graphs, but the emotional terrain is familiar. They show us that naming our fears, expressing them in structured ways, and seeking support from others are timeless strategies for resilience.

As Wisnom reflects: “Even the king of Assyria was admitting to feeling rubbish. Something we can all relate to.”

The problem with this is in the practical application today. I’m not the king of Assyria, and nor are you, so we can’t instruct a temple of professional lamenters to take our worries off our shoulders.

But maybe there is something basic here, in terms of personal delegation of worrying. “I do like the concept of delegating your worrying to somebody else or something else,” says Wisnom. “that’s something that I have in fact inadvertently tried myself. One night I was very worried about something. It was late at night. Nobody was awake so I called a friend in America because they are awake in America. He said to me ‘Don’t worry. I will hold your worries until morning,’ and it actually worked. I got back to sleep.”

So if perhaps the method of delegation is a little alien when we compare ourselves to the ancient Mesopotamians, the underlying concept works. Delegate your worries to someone else, or something else, and you might find the demon within more manageable.

David Musgrove is content director of the HistoryExtra.com website and podcast, plus its sister print magazine BBC History Magazine. He has a PhD in medieval landscape archaeology and is a fellow of the Royal Historical Society.