What Ancient Anxiety Tells Us About Ourselves?
Three thousand years ago, a scribe pressed a reed into wet clay and described sleepless nights, a tight chest, and fear without a reason. We follow the evidence from clay tablets and papyrus to living forager communities and evolutionary theory, and we are honest about what none of it can prove.
All research and sources are linked below.
CHAPTERS
0:00 The 3 AM Night That Is 3,000 Years Old
0:50 The Rules of This Investigation
1:15 Mesopotamia: The Clay Tablets
2:07 The Missing Word: Sadness
2:51 The Language of the Heart
3:34 Egypt: The Ebers Papyrus
4:42 Greece: Melancholia and Black Bile
5:39 Living Clues: The Tsimane and the Hadza
7:26 The Smoke Detector Theory
8:14 Is Depression an Adaptation?
8:48 Where the Evidence Leaves Us
9:49 Every Age Names Suffering Differently
10:12 Back to 3 AM
━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━
RESEARCH & SOURCES
▸ Mental Symptoms in the Akkadian Diagnostic Handbook: A study of patterns in the description of depression, anxiety, and madness. Moudhy N. Al-Rashid, 2014, DPhil thesis, University of Oxford.
https://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:96f4ebba-4e1c-4250-b96e-4c14d545646e
Fear, sleeplessness and bodily symptoms recurring under “Depression” and “Heartbreak.”
▸ Of Mental Affliction: Anxiety, Depression, and Paranoia in Mesopotamian Diagnostic and Magical Texts. Kotzé, 2026, Asian and African Studies, 35(1).
https://www.sav.sk/journals/uploads/05281855aas2026-1_KOTZ%C3%89_web%20%281%29.pdf
Heart-based phrases used for anxiety and despondency.
▸ Neurology and Psychiatry in Babylon. Oxford University Press Blog, 2014.
Bodily symptoms recorded, but almost no mention of the patient’s feelings.
▸ When Affective Disorders Were Considered to Emanate From the Heart: The Ebers Papyrus. Bou Khalil et al., American Journal of Psychiatry.
https://doi.org/10.1176/appi.ajp.2013.13070860
The “book of hearts” links low mood to the heart.
▸ His Mind is Shrouded in Darkness. Jennifer Cromwell, 2019, Papyrus Stories.
The heart as the seat of emotion and memory.
▸ Melancholy: the social construction of a disease. CAMWS.
https://camws.org/sites/default/files/94.Medicine.04.pdf
Black bile, wine, and melancholy in Problemata XXX.
▸ Black Bile, Manic Depression and Melancholy: Two Pillars of Our Understanding.
https://esmed.org/MRA/mra/article/view/2363
One reading of Problemata XXX as the bipolar spectrum.
▸ Functional Disability and Social Conflict Increase Risk of Depression in Older Adulthood Among Bolivian Forager-Farmers. Stieglitz, Schniter, von Rueden, Kaplan, Gurven, 2015, The Journals of Gerontology: Series B.
https://doi.org/10.1093/geronb/gbu080
Depression among 325 older Tsimane tracked injury, lost productivity and conflict.
▸ The Prevalence of Behavioural Symptoms and Psychiatric Disorders in Hadza Children. Ougrin, Woodhouse, Tucker et al., 2023, Scientific Reports.
https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-023-48114-4
Emotional problems were lower in Hadza children and no depressive disorder was diagnosed, but peer problems were higher.
▸ Evolutionary origins of depression: a review and reformulation. Daniel Nettle, 2004, Journal of Affective Disorders.
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jad.2003.08.009
Argues depression itself lacks the hallmarks of an adaptation.
▸ Good Reasons for Bad Feelings. Randolph Nesse. Book review.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6990450/
Why natural selection left us prone to anxiety and low mood.
▸ The biological basis of mental illness. Adrian Woolfson, book review, Nature news archive.
https://bioedonline.org/news/nature-news-archive/the-biological-basis-of-mental-illness/
Anxiety as a “smoke detector” for danger.
━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━
PEOPLE & SITES MENTIONED IN THIS VIDEO
▸ Moudhy Al-Rashid, Oxford researcher
▸ James Kinnier Wilson, Assyriologist, and Edward Reynolds, neurologist
▸ Georg Ebers, German Egyptologist
▸ Jonathan Stieglitz and Michael Gurven, Tsimane depression study
▸ Randolph Nesse, evolutionary psychiatrist
▸ Daniel Nettle, psychologist
▸ The Tsimane (Bolivia) and the Hadza (Tanzania)
▸ The Diagnostic Handbook tablets (Mesopotamia), the Ebers Papyrus (University of Leipzig)
━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━
This video is educational, not medical advice. If you are struggling, please talk to a doctor or a mental health professional.
#AncientHistory #MentalHealth #Documentary #Mesopotamia #AncientEgypt #Psychology
source
