Tea at Trianon: How Mesopotamians Experienced Emotions

John Wilson Croker on Marie-Antoinette

"We have followed the history of Marie Antoinette with the greatest diligence and scrupulosity. We have lived in those times. We have talked with some of her friends and some of her enemies; we have read, certainly not all, but hundreds of the libels written against her; and we have, in short, examined her life with– if we may be allowed to say so of ourselves– something of the accuracy of contemporaries, the diligence of inquirers, and the impartiality of historians, all combined; and we feel it our duty to declare, in as a solemn a manner as literature admits of, our well-matured opinion that every reproach against the morals of the queen was a gross calumny– that she was, as we have said, one of the purest of human beings."

~from History of the Guillotine by John Wilson Croker, 1844

Edmund Burke on Marie-Antoinette

"It is now sixteen or seventeen years since I saw the queen of France, then dauphiness, at Versailles; and surely there never lighted on this orb, which she hardly seemed to touch, a more delightful vision. I saw her just above the horizon, decorating and cheering the elevated sphere she had just begun to move in, glittering like a morning star full of life and splendor and joy. Oh, what a revolution....Little did I dream that I should have lived to see such disasters fall upon her, in a nation of gallant men, in a nation of men of honor and of cavaliers! I thought ten thousand swords must have leaped from their scabbards, to avenge even a look which threatened her with insult. But the age of chivalry is gone; that of sophisters, economists, and calculators has succeeded...."

~Edmund Burke, October 1790

Friday, December 13, 2024

How Mesopotamians Experienced Emotions

From Phys.org:

A multidisciplinary team of researchers studied a large body of texts to find out how people in the ancient Mesopotamian region (within modern day Iraq) experienced emotions in their bodies thousands of years ago, analyzing one million words of the ancient Akkadian language from 934–612 BC in the form of cuneiform scripts on clay tablets.

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

"Even in ancient Mesopotamia, there was a rough understanding of anatomy, for example the importance of the heart, liver and lungs," says Professor Saana Svärd of the University of Helsinki, an Assyriologist who is leading the research project. One of the most intriguing findings relates to where the ancients felt happiness, which was often expressed through words related to feeling 'open,' 'shining' or being 'full'––in the liver.

"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. (Read more.)