Emotions, ancientNear EastDANIEL C. SNELL

The seat of emotions in the ancient Near East

was the innards, sometimes identified with the

liver and the heart. People felt anger, pain, and

fear, and those feelings were said to come from

inside the person (Kammerer and Schwiderski

1998). There is not the extended rhetoric of

emotions afflicting a person from the outside

as seen in Greek.

It is hard to distinguish among words for

fury and anger. The numinous luminosity of

the gods and temples could overwhelm a per-

son, at least rhetorically. And demons might

afflict the person with unwelcome feelings.

The word for sin in Akkadian was not dis-

tinguished from the idea of guilt, the feeling of

remorse after a lapse. Modern scholars perceive

a rise in concern for guilt over the millennia,

culminating in righteous-sufferer composi-

tions known from the 1800s BCE to the late

first millennium. The major emotion expressed

in such texts was confusion at a lack of under-

standing of the causes of suffering (Lambert

1960).

REFERENCES AND SUGGESTED READINGS

Kammerer, T. and Schwiderski, D. (1998)

Deutsch-Akkadisches Worterbuch. Munster.

Lambert, W. (1960) Babylonian wisdom literature.

Oxford.

The Encyclopedia of Ancient History, First Edition. Edited by Roger S. Bagnall, Kai Brodersen, Craige B. Champion, Andrew Erskine,

and Sabine R. Huebner, print page 2390.

© 2013 Blackwell Publishing Ltd. Published 2013 by Blackwell Publishing Ltd.

DOI: 10.1002/9781444338386.wbeah01055

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