I was watching a recent episode of "Tasting History" on YouTube about ancient Sumerian beer and came across something that struck me as odd. A few times in the video, when referencing Sumerian texts, he mentions the word "liver," notably in a song at the 17 minute mark.
I know in the modern age we don't often give enough credit to the knowledge of ancient civilizations, but the notion that ancient Sumerians understood what alcohol actually was and which organ of the body dealt with it feels a bit far-fetched.
Could this just be the translator taking liberties for the sake of comprehension, or did the Sumerians actually understand human anatomy and metabolism to this extent?
The translator was not taking liberties. The line in question is :
Gakkule nig ur šagšagge
Which translates roughly to:
(Gakkul vat) (the thing) liver happy
It should be noted that the Sumerian language is not fully understood.
That being said, it is not likely that the Sumerians understood the concept of metabolism, or that the liver breaks down alcohol so that it can be removed from the body. The reason the Gakkul Vat song mentions the liver, is because in ancient Sumerian tradition, the liver was seen as the seat of the soul and mind. As such, the liver was the principle organ in the Sumerian art of divination, as put here by Morris Jastrow:
Now the liver was chosen for inspection as a natural consequence of that early, deep-grounded belief in the soul’s residence in that organ. The “center of vitality”* was there; and there especially, then, one should look for the workings of the divine mind. Thus the divining priest studied the lobes, the gall-bladder, the portal vein, the gates of the liver, the bile ducts, and other structures.
The evidence of this practice lies in the few surviving clay models of livers, one at the British Museum, as well as the Assyrian Barutu, which was the direct descendent of ancient Sumerian religious practices.
So essentially, instead of :
The gakkul vat makes the liver happy
a modern translation would be :
The gakkul vat makes the brain happy
Sumerians believed one's emotional state resided in the liver, we see it as residing in the brain, so that's a neat enough approximation.