Love in liveranger in feetsuffering in armpits. The ancient inhabitants of Mesopotamia perceived emotions exactly like us, but they “embodied” them in different parts of the body than those we associate today. In an era when science did not exist as we know it, love was not connected to the heart, but to the liver, an organ so important as to represent joy itself.
The phrase “to be happy” literally translated to “the liver is bright” (kabattu neperdu). Other emotions, such as sexual arousal, found their home in the ankles, while disgust took refuge in the simple shins.
If you’ve ever thought that emotions are universal, you may be right, but how they are perceived and associated with the body changes based on culture. This is precisely what emerges from a recent study that analyzed a million Akkadian words engraved on clay tablets between 934 and 612 BC, preserved to this day thanks to cuneiform writing. The work, led by Professor Saana Svärd of the University of Helsinki, was published in the journal iScience and it opened a new window into how Assyrians felt and experienced emotions.
Juha Lahnakoskia cognitive neuroscientist from Aalto University (Finland), compared ancient Mesopotamian body maps with modern ones, based on recent studies:
If we look at the map of happiness, for example, there are similarities. But the most marked difference lies precisely in the liver: for the Assyrians it was the center of love and joy, while today we connect it little to emotions.
And it doesn’t end here. Another big difference is observed in anger: today we tend to perceive it in the hands and upper body, associating it with a need to act or fight. The ancient Mesopotamians, however, placed this emotion in the feet, associating it with a sensation of heat that pushed them forward, perhaps symbolically towards “escape” or “movement”.
Emotions, cuneiform writing and a look to the future
It is fascinating, but there is a detail that should not be underestimated: cuneiform writing, so rich in information, was a luxury reserved for a few. Between 3000 and 300 BC, only scribes of the upper classes could read and write. This means that the tablets analyzed mainly tell the worldview of the elites. The documents examined range from personal letters, sales contracts, prayers and the first historical or mathematical texts.
For now, this approach linking emotions and body parts has only been used to study Mesopotamia, but it could be applied to other cultures, as Saana Svärd concludes:
We could explore how cultural differences have shaped the way we experience emotions.
