Ancient Texts Reveal How Mesopotamians Felt Emotions—From Happiness in the Liver to Anger in the Feet

It’s common for humans to express our emotions with phrases related to the body. For example, butterflies in the stomach describes nervousness, a weight on the shoulders is a sense of responsibility and a lump in the throat represents sadness. Whether or not they are tied to actual biological processes, common associations tend to transcend cultural boundaries—and, according to new research, even thousands of years of history.

A team of researchers has compared how ancient Mesopotamians felt their emotions in the body by studying Akkadian texts from the first millennium B.C.E. and compared the results to present-day associations. While the researchers found meaningful overlap, there were also some surprising—and, frankly, hilarious—anatomical contrasts. The study was published in the journal iScience at the beginning of the month.

While previous research has mapped out how we commonly feel emotions in our bodies today, discovering ancient associations, in the words of Science Alert’s Mike McRae, “isn’t as straightforward as holding up a picture of the human body and asking a paleolithic mammoth hunter where they feel happiness.”

Instead, researchers turned to an online library of digitized ancient texts, analyzing one million Akkadian words written in cuneiform—a syllabic script and the oldest known writing system—on clay tablets dating from 934 B.C.E. to 612 B.C.E. The team then created body diagrams to compare the ancient physical experience of emotions to the modern.

“We see certain body areas that are still used in similar contexts in modern times,” Juha Lahnakoski, lead author of the study and a cognitive neuroscientist at Germany’s LVR Clinic Düsseldorf, tells Science News’ Jason Bittel. “For example, the heart was often mentioned together with positive emotions such as love, pride and happiness, as we might still say ‘my heart swelled’ with joy or pride.”

Our bodily map of happiness, in fact, is relatively similar to that of the Mesopotamians, with a notable exception: the liver. In their writings, Mesopotamians sometimes associated a “shining” or fullness with the organ during moments of happiness. Love was felt similarly between the groups, too, though Mesopotamians also expressed the emotion in relation to their knees and, once again, the liver.

Lahnakoski suggests the contrasting ancient associations may point to different cultural expectations, as well as their limited anatomical understanding: “For instance, the liver is prominent when you open up the body,” he tells New Scientist’s Colin Barras. “As a big organ, people might have assumed that the soul lives in the liver.”

“Even in ancient Mesopotamia, there was a rough understanding of anatomy, for example the importance of the heart, liver and lungs,” study co-author Saana Svärd, an Assyriologist at the University of Helsinki in Finland, adds in a statement.

Another emotion the researchers compared was anger, which modern humans tend to feel in the upper body and hands, while Mesopotamians felt “heated,” “enraged” or “angry” in their feet and legs, per the statement.

The ancient texts frequently described envy as being felt in the arms, disgust in the shins, suffering in the armpits and sexual arousal in the ankles and hands.

Despite these differences, the similarities contribute “to the broader conversation about the universality and variability of emotional experiences in human history,” as Kambiz Kamrani writes for Anthropology.net.

However, the researchers point out that using only textual evidence to identify how Mesopotamians associated emotions with body parts introduces biases and restricts the kinds of observations they can draw. For example, only wealthy classes in ancient Mesopotamia could afford to have scribes write for them, according to the statement. Additionally, the team was unable to study any references to female anatomy because of limits within their digital tools.

Though it’s too early to make any universal claims, at the very least the research confirms that “people are people, it seems,” Karen Sonik, a cultural historian at Auburn University who wasn’t involved in the study, says to New Scientist, “even across a gulf of some 3,000 years.”

Margherita Bassi | READ MORE

Margherita Bassi is a freelance journalist and trilingual storyteller. Her work has appeared in publications including BBC Travel, Discover magazine, Live Science, Atlas Obscura and Hidden Compass.