Neither Sumerian nor Assyro-Babylonian cuneiform sources have left any account, however incomplete, of their psychological ideas, probably because, for these ancient peoples, such ideas were considered self-evident and did not need to be set down in writing. Scholars are thus faced with a difficult situation, which is made still more difficult by the scholars themselves projecting their own cultures onto the subject they are studying, namely their own ideas concerning the body and the soul (in this context see, for example, the title of this article, which is not particularly appropriate to deal with the cultural attitudes of the ancient peoples described here).

Using the meager information provided by the texts, the issue was initially dealt with by Oppenheim and—albeit in a less general manner—by von Soden, both in 1964 (Oppenheim, 1964; revised 1977, pp. 198–206; von Soden, 1964) but it remained a peripheral research...