The Greeks held that it controlled reason, thought and emotion. It's possible that the Greek association of ivy with the god Dionysus the god of sensual things led to the heart being identified with romantic love. Once the heart surfaced as a mark for sex, it's not a large leap to understand how it came to connote love, too. And, in time, eternal love.
It was around the Middle Ages that the heart symbol took on its current meaning. At that time, according to Christian theology, it was meant to represent Jesus Christ and his love. Devout Christians began to inject the icon into art and literature from that era.
When Valentine's Day originated in England in the s, the heart symbol was the obvious choice for symbol to reflect the new holiday. During the same period, medical professionals were making great discoveries and advances in understanding the function of the human heart and diagramming a sketch of the organ. Even after scientists proved that the human heart didn't exactly line up with people's conception of it, the people "still preferred to associate the pounding muscle beneath their ribs with the emotion that made it sprint, or stagger," reported Lapham's Quarterly.
This Day In History. History Vault. Medieval Anatomical Drawings Featured Heart Shape While the silphium theory is compelling, the true origins of the heart shape may be more straightforward. Recommended for you. How the Troubles Began in Northern Ireland. Or, you can suffer from heartache, and you might get a toothache from all the sentimental heart-shaped candies that emerge each February.
Its journey tells us a little about the way we view the world and our place in it. Meanwhile, the origins of the classic cleft-heart symbol for love are still debated.
Many of us have been taught that ancient Egyptians thought the brain was worthless, that their embalmers scooped it out through the nostrils of a mummy-in-progress and threw it away.
But the truth about how the ancients viewed the heart versus the brain, as you might expect, is a little more complicated. An Egyptian medical text dated to around B.
It mentions head injuries and some of the problems that could ensue. Ancient Greek and Roman philosophers similarly considered the heart of utmost importance. Aristotle, in fourth century B. Greece, posited that the heart was the source of life and the center of the nervous system. About years later, the Roman physician Galen argued that nerves are connected to the brain.
The very same heart symbol with two lobes and a bottom V design we tend to see everywhere now. Historians conclude that this heart shape symbol was about silphium, a species of giant fennel that once grew on the coastline near ancient Cyrene. Silphium trade became an important rich commodity for the city. The ancient Greeks and Romans used silphium for both food flavoring and medicinal purposes.
However, it was most famous for its contraceptive properties. It became so popular that it was cultivated into extinction by the first century A. There is speculation that the heart shape may have originated from artists, scientists, and monks of the Middle Ages who attempted to draw representations of ancient medical texts.
In the 14th century, the Italian physicist Guido da Vigevano created a series of anatomical drawings featuring a heart that closely resembles the one described by Aristotle.
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