Françoise Foliot / Wikimedia
New research analyzed ancient texts and revealed that the people of Mesopotamia felt specific emotions in certain parts of the body.
Emotions may have a special connection to very specific parts of the body, and a new study reveals that the population of ancient Mesopotamia had the anger located on the thighs. The information did not come out of nowhere: it is based on an analysis of thousands of Neo-Assyrian texts from the 10th to the 7th century BC
People from the region considered the Cradle of Civilization also felt the love and happiness in the liver, the suffering in the armpits and the sexual excitement in the ankles.
Researchers at the University of Helsinki in Finland created a heat map of specific body parts to 18 emotional sensations different, from love, anger and envy to happiness, pride and even sadness.
The study mentions that few emotions were exclusive to any organ, limb or zone. Love could be felt in the knees, but it also resonated in the liver and heart.
“Emotions are associated with subjective bodily sensations specific emotions. Here, we use this relationship and computational linguistic methods to map a representation of emotions in ancient texts”, says , published in iScience.
Emotions in the body
The authors say that they analyzed Neo-Assyrian texts from 934 a 612 a.C. to identify linguistic expressions related to emotions and bodily sensations.
car skip
“We then calculate statistical regularities between emotion terms and words referring to body parts and project back the resulting emotion-body part relationships onto a body modelproducing maps of bodily sensations to emotions”, they write.
Lahnokoski et al, 2024 / Cell
Places on the body associated with different emotions, such as fear, anger and happiness
The analysis allowed us to arrive at four main groups of bodily emotion categories:
- Two groups of mainly positive emotions
- A large group of mostly negative emotions
- One of empathy
“These results reveal the historical use of embodied language pertaining to human emotions. Our data-driven tool can enable future comparisons of textual embodiment patterns in different languages and cultures over time,” they add.
Differences between ancient and modern
According to previous research, anger is felt by modern humans in the upper body and hands, while Mesopotamians felt more heated, enraged or angry in the lower part. Meanwhile, love is felt quite similarly by modern and Neo-Assyrian man.
