How Did Our Ancestors Feel Emotions?

Where did the ancient inhabitants of Mesopotamia feel emotions? Did they “feel” love in their hearts and fear in their stomachs, like us?

A recent study, led by Professor Saana Svärd, from the University of Helsinki, has examined several Mesopotamian texts to find out where the ancient inhabitants of the Tigris and Euphrates valley “felt” emotions and whether they coincide with the traditional organs related to the various feelings. Among other things, The research concludes that the Mesopotamians “felt” happiness in the liver, the organ to which they gave the greatest importance.

The emotions of our Mesopotamian ancestors

The study has analyzed more than a million words of texts written in Akkadian, one of the languages ​​of ancient Mesopotamia, captured in cuneiform writing on clay supports.

Akkadian is a language of the Semitic branch that spread across the plains of the Tigris and Euphrates between 900 and 600 BC. Some of the most beautiful texts of Mesopotamian literature were composed with this language, a primary source for discovering where people felt. emotions our ancestors.

Happiness is felt in the liver… and love, in the knees

Through this multidisciplinary study, Professor Svärd’s team concluded that ancient Mesopotamians considered the liver to be a fundamental organ in life and human emotional experience. The conclusion is based on expressions found in the texts, which talk about the liver “shining” or “opening” when the person feels happiness or joy.

In this way, we find a clear difference between how the inhabitants of ancient Mesopotamia felt emotions and how we traditionally feel them in Western culture. For us, for example, one of the organs most related to the emotional sphere, on a metaphorical level, is the heart, an idea that is more linked to ancient Egypt and classical antiquity.

Other important parts of the human body for the ancient Mesopotamians were the lungs and feet. The latter were related to anger and fear, very powerful emotions that, like a wrong step, can unbalance the entire organism.

On the other hand, in ancient Mesopotamia there are numerous literary examples that love “impacted” especially on the knees, something natural if we consider the tremor that can overcome us in the presence of the loved one. This effect on the knees can also be related to the idea of ​​kneeling before one’s loved one, a form of idealized veneration very present in literature, which equates the object of love with a divinity.

Emotions in other ancient cultures: Egypt and the heart

Not all ancient cultures agreed on the place in the body where emotions were concentrated. We have seen how the liver was transcendental for the ancient Mesopotamians, but, in the case of Egypt, Its importance was surpassed by the organ par excellence: the heart.

Indeed; Although the ancient Egyptians considered the liver a vital organ (after the death of the individual, they carefully wrapped it in linen and kept it in one of the four canopic jars), the heart was the center of all human emotionality. Much more than that: it was the place where the soul and, therefore, life resided.

The heart was the only viscera that remained in the body of the deceased, as it was a crucial element for Osiris’ judgment in the afterlife. The main organ of the circulatory system was where not only the vital force was located, but also the “summary” of the deceased’s entire trajectory throughout the world.

The brain-heart debate

In contrast to this, the brain was unimportant to the Egyptians. Not only was it extracted from the body (with an iron, through the nostrils) but it was discarded without further consideration. In fact, the importance of the cerebral organ is much later. We must go back to the 5th century BC, to classical Greece, where we find the first debate about what the epicenter of the human soul really was.

The brain-heart debate raged for many centuries. Thus, while thinkers of the stature of Aristotle defended the preponderance of the heart, Hippocrates and his followers opted for the brain, where they considered thought resided. In any case, these authors and their respective positions (cardiocentrism and encephalocentrism) will inaugurate a discussion that will have its echoes in the debates between Arab, Jewish and Christian doctors of the Middle Ages.

The liver as a book of the gods

But not only ancient Mesopotamia considered the liver as something fundamental to the human body. In Greece and Rome (the latter, due to the inheritance of Etruscan traditions) The liver was considered the book where the gods wrote their will. Thus, this organ was not so much the seat of joy and happiness (as it was in Mesopotamia) but rather the vehicle through which the divinity expressed its desires.

It is in Greece and Rome where hepatoscopy appears or, in other words, reading the liver to predict the future and consider good and bad omens. After sacrificing an animal (usually a sheep), its liver was examined in order to read what the gods wanted to transmit to humanity. For example, the abnormality of the liver lobes was considered a very bad omen.

Although divination by hepatoscopy It had its peak in Greek and Latin antiquity, the first record of divination through the liver is found in Babylon; It is a clay reproduction of a sheep liver, made in the 2nd millennium BC and which was probably used for teaching future priests.

Human beings have always tended to relate their emotions with the organs of the body or with the various parts of it. In fact, many alternative currents of medicine insist on the relationship between each of the organs with the various human emotions.

The link between organ and emotion has varied throughout history. Although there are correspondences (the heart, for example, has always had an indisputable importance in all cultures), there are other parts whose emotional relationship has been changing. This is the case of the liver, which for the ancient Mesopotamians enjoyed a privileged position as the seat of happiness and plenitude and which, however, for us has a very different meaning, more related to fear or intuition.

The liver is the only organ in the body that can regenerate. Perhaps that is why throughout the history of humanity it has had a unique status as a source of divination and vehicle of the will of the gods.