Have you ever felt like there was a pit in your stomach? What about a flutter in your heart?
It turns out that the anatomical connections we make with certain emotions and feelings — what researchers call embodied emotions — may be more universal than you’d think. In fact, people have been making very similar statements about their bodies for about 3,000 years.
In a new study published in iScience, researchers catalogued words for body parts and emotions used by people who lived in Mesopotamia between 934 and 612 BCE, in what is now a region that includes Egypt, Iraq, and Türkiye. Then, they compared those ancient ideas etched on clay tablets and other artifacts to commonly used modern-day links between emotions and body parts, using bodily maps to visualize the similarities and differences.
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Happiness: Have you ever felt happiness in your… liver? The Mesopotamians did, as you can see from the bright orange spot on this heat map highlighting the body parts frequently mentioned alongside the emotion in ancient (right) and modern (left) sources. Modern/PNAS: Lauri Nummenmaa et al. 2014, Mesopotamian: Juha Lahnakoski 2024 -
Love: The ancients (right) saw love as emanating from one’s liver, knees and heart, the latter of which coincides nicely with how we envision love’s anatomy today (left). Modern/PNAS: Lauri Nummenmaa et al. 2014, Mesopotamian: Juha Lahnakoski 2024 -
Anger: In this heat map, you can see just how differently ancient Mesopotamians (right) thought about anger. The writing most commonly associated anger with the legs and feet, whereas today (left) we experience the emotion in the upper parts of the body. Modern/PNAS: Lauri Nummenmaa et al. 2014, Mesopotamian: Juha Lahnakoski 2024
“We see certain body areas that are still used in similar contexts in modern times,” says Juha Lahnakoski, lead author of…
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