Knowledge of the Heart in the Earliest Literate Cultures
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.4467/2543702XSHS.26.017.22706Keywords:
ancient civilization, Mesopotamia, cuneiform, anatomy, ŠA3, heart, history of medicine, Sumerian, AkkadianAbstract
Several ancient civilizations assigned a special status to the heart. It is nonetheless difficult to ascertain what was known of cardiac anatomy and function because the surviving artefacts are an incomplete representation of what the ancients knew.
Cuneiform is one of the world’s oldest writing systems and it is based in part on logograms that resemble their referents and seem to depict actual objects and entities. Here, we discuss the intentional similarity between one form of the cuneiform sign ŠA3, which was written as a rhombus with four equal compartments, and the four-chambered heart in mammals.
As references for our analysis, we review that anatomy can be the basis of early writing in ancient Chinese and that some detailed knowledge of the heart existed in ancient Egypt and pre-conquest Mesoamerica.
Translations of ancient cuneiform writing from Mesopotamia reveal quite detailed anatomical knowledge of sheep entrails, as the appearance of these entrails was interpreted as omens. Concerning sheep’s heart, numerous terms were in use, but their anatomical meanings are largely obscure.
The human heart, in contrast, was referred to by one term as a single entity. For a period around 2000 BCE the sign ŠA3 was written as a rhombus with four compartments and it is regularly interpreted and translated as “heart”. In its full history, however, neither the form of the cuneiform sign ŠA3 nor its related terms in both the Sumerian and Akkadian languages was restricted to the interpretation “heart”. We conclude ancient Mesopotamian scribes and specialists could have recognized the similarity between ŠA3 and the heart, while there is currently no proof that ŠA3 was meant to represent this organ.
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