The birth of the undead. Brief history of the vampire.
Imagine you’re playing an association game. The word is vampire. Be quick. You say: Dracula (or if you’re slightly cooler: Carmilla). And there is nothing wrong with that, obviously. The two books have become somewhat of a pattern and an archetype to copy if you ever wanted to write a vampire book that is in any way accurate to the traditional beliefs of what the vampires were and what they represented.
However, as you may have guessed already, the evolution of the vampire into our pop culture did not start with Bram Stoker’s ‘Dracula’ nor with Sheridan Le Fanu's ‘Carmilla’.
In fact, it starts way before that. The idea of a creature whose lineage stretches back at least 4,000 years goes through Balkan villages, Southeast Asian rice paddies, West African forests, and Mesopotamian temples. There wasn’t a culture that didn’t imagine a creature that was drinking the blood of the living. The ideas varied depending on where you heard them. Lamashtu, for instance, a Mesopotamian blood drinker which appeared in the third millenium BCE, had the head of a lion, body of a woman, donkey-like teeth and ears, bird talons instead of teeth, and so on. It sounds almost absurd, especially if we compare it to the image of a vampire we have now. The image holds no seduction; instead, it’s just scary and ugly.
Another thing about ancient vampires is that they didn’t all have the same role. In the sense that yes, they were all killing people, but their victims varied. To illustrate, the previously mentioned Lamashtu’s victims were pregnant women and babies. She would sneak into the house of a pregnant woman, touch her stomach seven times, and leave, causing her to miscarry. She could also steal a newborn baby from a cradle, feed it with her toxic breast milk, drink its blood, suck out its marrow, and then eat it. Whereas, for example, Empusa would attack young men (students, travelers). She would put on the form of a beautiful, seductive woman to allure her victims, then she would drink the men’s blood and eat their bodies.
Returning to the subject of the brief history of a vampire, preceded with an image of how the ancient differed from a modern one, I have to admit there is no just one first vampire. You can’t really say that there was one outstanding vampire that came along way before the others. (As a matter of fact, the word ‘vampire’ was not in use until the 1730s CE). Based on the written word, we can assume that the first vampires were described in Mesopotamia. It’s there that the myths of blood-drinking demons, restless ghosts, and life-draining spirits that inspired later vampire traditions were first recorded.
There, they were not just monsters; they were a reflection of people’s fears. They were a source of explanation for the upsetting parts of their lives. Vampires like Lamashtu explained infant mortality and complications during birth. Other vampires like Ekimmu showed fears of disease or early death.
A different, quite iconic ancient vampire which is said to be one of the first ones is the goddess Sekhmet (later influenced a character of Akasha from the Vampire Chronicles). She originated in Egypt, first described around 2400 years BCE. There, she was said to have saved humanity by drinking the blood-red water of the Nile, which was causing people to drown due to its dangerous overflow. After that, her bloodlust caused her to launch a terrifying rampage against humanity. That slaughter was ended by the sun god Ra, who intervened by tricking her with seven thousand jars of beer dyed red with ochre. Mistaking the alcohol for blood, Sekhmet drank until she collapsed into a deep, intoxicated sleep.
Concluding, the origin of the idea of vampire should be associated with both Mesopotamia and Egypt, even though they were popular in plenty of cultures across the world. They gave birth to a vampire, which influenced the archetype we know now.
There is a continuation of the story, though. The modern picture of a vampire started to gain popularity sometime in the 18th century, which was a consequence of an unprecedented vampire hysteria across Southern and Western Europe, largely driven by misidentified disease outbreaks, military conflicts, and post-mortem decomposition. Epidemics of rabies, which caused light sensitivity, aggression, hydrophobia, and foaming at the mouth, as well as pellagra, a vitamin deficiency linked to newly imported American corn that left sufferers with severe dermatitis and photosensitivity, were widely mistaken for signs of vampirism. As Austrian and German soldiers fighting the Ottoman Empire witnessed local exhumations, they brought the dark accounts back to the West, giving reports of surged vampire attacks (officially bringing the word "vampire" into European vocabulary around 1730).
Lack of medical and scientific understanding had a major contribution to the vampire phenomenon at the time. People mistook natural decomposition, such as abdominal bloating, skin shrinkage, and blood purging from facial orifices, as proof of undead feeding. This caused widespread hysteria and grave desecration, which eventually forced government intervention, and strict laws were enacted banning vampire hunts, which became popular as a social form of vigilantism.
The turning point of the vampire image happened during the 19th and 20th centuries, when it shifted from a bloated, decomposing corpse into the sophisticated, aristocratic archetype recognized today. This transformation was largely driven by Gothic literature. We can see this image in literature that is still commonly read today. John Polidori’s 1819 story ‘The Vampyre’ first introduced the vampire as a wealthy, persuasive aristocrat, while Sheridan Le Fanu’s ‘Carmilla’ added emotional depth and seduction. The classic ‘Dracula’ written by Bram Stoker perpetuated the modern well-known stereotype, synthesizing folklore into the iconic image of a charismatic, castle-dwelling count. He expanded the image with some supernatural rules such as lacking a mirror reflection and requiring an invitation to enter a home. In the 20th century, authors like Anne Rice, an author of ‘Interview with the Vampire’ (‘The Vampire Chronicles'), humanized vampires even further into complex, brooding antiheroes, fusing the pop-culture image of the suave, pale, and eternally immortal figure.
The portrayal of the vampire evolved from an attempt to explain personal tragedies like miscarriages, to a collective scapegoat during sudden plagues, and finally repurposed the creature into a literary allegory for psychological desire, mortality, and social repression.
Page design: Julia Odyjewska
Bibliography
Osborne, J. (2025, November 25). Long before Dracula, an ancient Mesopotamian civilisation raised the world’s oldest vampires. HistoryExtra. Retrieved October 10, 2026, from https://www.historyextra.com/period/ancient-history/mesopotamian-civilisation-first-vampire-story/
van de Goot, F. R. W., & Berge, R. L. t. (2002). Lamashtu, “she who erases,” touched her stomach seven times to kill the child. Journal of Clinical Pathology, 55(7), 534–534. Retrieved October 10, 2026 from https://doi.org/10.1136/jcp.55.7.534
Contributors to Vampedia. (n.d.). Lamashtu. Vampedia; Fandom, Inc. Retrieved October 10, 2026, from https://vampires.fandom.com/wiki/Lamashtu
G, J. (2026, June 7). The Empusa: The Shape-Shifting Demon of Ancient Greece and Her Connection to Hecate. Talesofmythandmagic.Co.Uk. Retrieved October 10, 2026 from https://talesofmythandmagic.co.uk/the-empusa-the-shape-shifting-vampire-demon-of-ancient-greece/
Meet Sekhmet, The Ancient Egyptian Cat Goddess And Possibly The World’s First Vampire. (n.d.). Ranker. Retrieved October 10, 2026, from https://www.ranker.com/list/goddess-sekhmet-first-vampire/april-a-taylor
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