The inhabitants of Mesopotamia must have known grief, fear, love and awe 鈥� but they didn鈥檛 necessarily think about them in the same way we do. An analysis of cuneiform texts shows that these ancient people felt disgust in their shins, suffering in their armpits and sexual arousal in their ankles. The work reveals the important hold that culture and knowledge have over our understanding of our own feelings.
Emotions map onto the human body in a across large parts of the modern world 鈥� some reliably trigger a quickening of the heart or a cold sweat on the brow, for example 鈥� but it is unclear why. On the one hand, this might reflect our underlying biology, but it may also be explained by the interconnected nature of the modern world and by shared cultural expectations of how we should embody our emotions.
at Aalto University in Finland and his colleagues have begun to tease these two factors apart by examining how the inhabitants of Mesopotamia almost 3000 years ago mapped emotions onto the human body. To do so, they used an that includes personal letters and literary epics. The researchers searched the library for the consistent co-occurrence of words expressing emotions and words relating to human anatomy.
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They found that ancient Mesopotamians associated some emotions with body parts in the same way we do. For instance, they linked pride to the heart. This hints at a shared biological basis for embodying certain emotions.
Just as importantly, however, the Mesopotamians embodied many other emotions in ways that might seem strange to us. For instance, they felt happiness in their liver, surprise in their kidneys and anger in their thighs and knees. This explains why an ancient Mesopotamian idiom meaning 鈥渢o be happy鈥� referred to the liver (kabattu) being bright (neperdu).
Lahnakoski says these differences suggest that the way Mesopotamians thought of some emotions was influenced by cultural expectations 鈥� and also probably by an imperfect understanding of human anatomy. 鈥淔or instance, the liver is prominent when you open up the body,鈥� he says. 鈥淎s a big organ, people might have assumed that the soul lives in the liver.鈥�
The study highlights the 鈥渋nterplay between language, culture and cognition in shaping emotional expression鈥�, says at the Complutense University of Madrid in Spain.
That being said, the fact that Mesopotamians embodied some emotions in a way that is familiar to us is a useful reminder that we share much in common with the inhabitants of the ancient world, despite our cultural differences, says at Auburn University, Alabama. 鈥淧eople are people, it seems, even across a gulf of some 3000 years.鈥�
iScience
