We might feel love in our fingertips –– but did the Ancient Mesopotamians?

‘If you compare the ancient Mesopotamian bodily map of happiness with modern bodily maps [published by fellow Finnish scientist, Lauri Nummenmaa and colleagues a decade ago], it is largely similar, with the exception of a notable glow in the liver,’ says cognitive neuroscientist Juha Lahnakoski, a visiting researcher at Aalto University.

Other contrasting results between ourselves and the ancients can be seen in emotions such as anger and love. According to previous research, anger is experienced by modern humans in the upper body and hands, while Mesopotamians felt most 'heated', 'enraged' or 'angry' in their feet. Meanwhile, love is experienced quite similarly by modern and Neo-Assyrian man, although in Mesopotamia it is particularly associated with the liver, heart and knees.

‘It remains to be seen whether we can say something in the future about what kind of emotional experiences are typical for humans in general and whether, for example, fear has always been felt in the same parts of the body. Also, we have to keep in mind that texts are texts and emotions are lived and experienced,’ says Svärd. The researchers caution that while it’s fascinating to compare, we should keep this distinction in mind when comparing the modern body maps, which were based on self-reported bodily experience, with body maps of Mesopotamians based on linguistic descriptions alone.

Towards a deeper understanding of emotions

Since literacy was rare in Mesopotamia (3 000-300 BCE), cuneiform writing was mainly produced by scribes and therefore available only to the wealthy. However, cuneiform clay tablets contained a wide variety of texts, such as tax lists, sales documents, prayers, literature and early historical and mathematical texts.

Ancient Near Eastern texts have never been studied in this way, by quantitatively linking emotions to body parts. This can be applied to other language materials in the future. ‘It could be a useful way to explore intercultural differences in the way we experience emotions,’ says Svärd, who hopes the research will provide an interesting contribution to discussion around the universality of emotions.

The results of the research will be published in the iScience journal on 4 December.

The corpus linguistic method, which makes use of large text sets, has been developed over many years in the Centre of Excellence in Ancient Near Eastern Empires (ANEE), led by Svärd. Next, the research team will look at an English corpus, or textual material from the 20th century, which contains 100 million words. Similarly, they also plan to examine Finnish data. 

In addition to Svärd and Lahnakoski, the team includes Professor Mikko Sams from Aalto University, Ellie Bennett from the University of Helsinki, Professor Lauri Nummenmaa from the University of Turku and Ulrike Steinert from Johannes Gutenberg-Universität Mainz. The project is funded by the Finnish Cultural Foundation.

Further information:

Juha Lahnakoski
Visiting researcher, Aalto University
Researcher, Forschungszentrum Jülich and LVR-Klinikum Düsseldorf
juha.lahnakoski@aalto.fi
Tel. +49 173 655 4954

Saana Svärd
Professor, University of Helsinki
saana.svard@helsinki.fi
Tel. +358 50 448 2433

Mikko Sams
Professor, Aalto University
mikko.sams@aalto.fi
Tel. +358 50 521 5739