The project Embodied Emotions: Ancient Mesopotamia and Today was granted funding by the Finnish Cultural Foundation in September 2022 and will run until 2025.
It explores how emotions were embodied by people in the past compared with the present. How did the embodiment of emotions differ in the ancient times due to cultural differences, stemming from differences in the ways the human body, physiology and emotions were understood? The comparison will tell us whether one of the oldest Semitic languages, Akkadian, verbalizes different emotions with similar body-related expressions as modern languages.