Researchers have explored ancient texts to investigate whether humans experience emotions similarly across different times, languages, and cultures. By analyzing a vast collection of ancient writings, they examined how people in Mesopotamia, located in present-day Iraq, perceived and expressed their emotions thousands of years ago.
Feeling emotions physically, like a tight chest from anxiety or butterflies in the stomach from excitement, is a universal human experience. But did ancient civilizations experience emotions the same way?
A research team studied approximately one million words from clay tablets inscribed with cuneiform in the Akkadian language, dating from 934 to 612 BCE. According to Professor Saana Svärd, an Assyriologist from the University of Helsinki leading the study, ancient Mesopotamians had a basic understanding of human anatomy, emphasizing organs like the heart, liver, and lungs.
One fascinating discovery involved the emotion of happiness. Mesopotamian texts often described happiness using terms like “open,” “radiant,” or “full,” with a strong connection to the liver. Cognitive neuroscientist Juha Lahnakoski from Aalto University noted a striking similarity between ancient representations of happiness and modern bodily maps of emotions, with the exception of the liver’s prominence in Mesopotamian descriptions.
In contrast, emotions like anger and love showed distinct differences. While modern individuals typically describe anger as an upper-body sensation involving the hands, Mesopotamians often referred to anger as a sensation of heat in the feet. Love, on the other hand, had surprisingly consistent descriptions across both cultures, with the liver, heart, and knees playing significant roles in Mesopotamian accounts.
Svärd emphasized the challenge of comparing ancient and modern experiences directly, as ancient descriptions are based solely on linguistic records, unlike contemporary studies that often rely on self-reported experiences.
Expanding Emotional Understanding
During the Mesopotamian era (3000 BCE – 300 BCE), literacy was rare, and written records were predominantly produced by scribes for the wealthy. These clay tablets covered various subjects, from tax records and sales agreements to prayers, literature, and early mathematics.
The approach used in this study, mapping bodily sensations based on textual descriptions, had never been applied to ancient Near Eastern texts before. Svärd believes this methodology could be useful for analyzing other linguistic datasets, providing valuable insights into cross-cultural emotional experiences.
The research findings, published in Science on December 4th, contribute to ongoing debates about the universality of emotions. The next phase of the study will involve analyzing a 100-million-word English text corpus from the 20th century, alongside a similar dataset in Finnish.
The interdisciplinary team includes researchers from Aalto University, the University of Helsinki, the University of Turku, and Johannes Gutenberg University, with funding from the Finnish Cultural Foundation.
Reference: Juha M. Lahnakoski, Ellie Bennett, Lauri Nummenmaa, Ulrike Steinert, Mikko Sams, Saana Svärd. Embodied emotions in ancient Neo-Assyrian texts revealed by bodily mapping of emotional semantics. iScience, 2024; 111365. DOI: 10.1016/j.isci.2024.111365.
Source: www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2024/12/241204113643.htm
