Ancient Mesopotamians felt happiness in liver, anger in feet

According to a recent study, ancient Mesopotamians experienced emotions differently from modern humans. The research was conducted by a multidisciplinary team led by Professor Saana Svärd, an Assyriologist at the University of Helsinki. The team analyzed nearly one million words of the ancient Akkadian language, dating from 934 to 612 BCE, recorded in cuneiform script on clay tablets. These texts included personal letters, literary epics, tax lists, and prayers.

Using a unique linguistic method developed at the Center of Excellence in Ancient Near Eastern Empires (ANEE), the researchers linked mentions of emotions with specific parts of the body. The method had not been applied to ancient texts before, as reported by Science Daily. The findings, published in the journal iScience, shed light on how the inhabitants of Mesopotamia, now modern-day Iraq, understood and expressed emotions like happiness, anger, and love.

The research team included experts from various fields. The team included Professor Saana Svärd from the University of Helsinki, cognitive neuroscientist Juha Lahnakoski at the Jülich Research Centre, Professor Mikko Sams from Aalto University, Ellie Bennett from the University of Helsinki, Professor Lauri Nummenmaa from the University of Turku, and Dr. Ulrike Steinert from Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz.

One of the most intriguing discoveries relates to where the ancients felt happiness. Happiness in Mesopotamia was often expressed through words related to feeling "openness," "radiance," or "fullness" in the liver. In contrast, modern humans usually associate happiness with the heart or the upper body as a whole. "The liver is prominent when you open up the body. As a big organ, people might have assumed that the soul lives in the liver," Cognitive neuroscientist Juha Lahnakoski noted, according to New Scientist.

The study also found differences in how anger was perceived. While modern humans tend to feel anger in their upper body and hands, ancient Mesopotamians felt it most intensely in their feet. Mesopotamians connected love to the liver and knees, reflecting the emotional intensity that "bends" people or brings them to their knees.

Professor Svärd highlighted the Mesopotamians' basic understanding of anatomy. "Even in ancient Mesopotamia, there was a rough understanding of anatomy, for example the importance of the heart, liver and lungs," she stated. The team used software to search for statistical co-occurrences of words expressing emotions and words relating to human anatomy, revealing consistent patterns.

The researchers caution that while it's fascinating to compare modern body maps based on self-reported experiences with those of Mesopotamians based on linguistic descriptions, distinctions should be kept in mind.

The team plans to apply this method to other cultures and languages to explore how emotions differ across time and place. They will analyze a 20th-century English text corpus containing 100 million words to identify cultural features of emotion perception in a different time.

New Scientist, Discover Magazine, Focus Online, GreekReporter, Al Jazeera, Phys.org, and Science Daily reported on the findings, among other websites.

This article was written in collaboration with generative AI company Alchemiq