A Look Into the Heart of Ancient Mexico

The cardiologist, who’s also a published art history buff, reached Exhibit No. 251 and felt his heart jump.

Before him sat a ceramic vessel, just 7 inches tall, crafted 3,000 years ago. The male figurine wore a helmet of hair, a flat nose and fat lips. Its body appeared split down the middle, and three large arteries shot from its shoulders.

“My god,” Dr. Gordon Bendersky said to himself that day in the Art Museum at Princeton University. “That’s the oldest image of the heart.”

Research spanning one year, 300 hours and thousands of pages confirmed the theory for Bendersky. The Olmecs, ancient predecessors to the Mayans and Aztecs of early Mexico, molded the earliest known anatomically correct image of the heart, he wrote recently in the journal Perspectives in Biology and Medicine.

The vessel, believed to have been found in Las Bocas, a city in south-central Mexico, includes a pulmonary artery, an aorta and a superior vena cava. It even features an interventricular sulcus, the crease dividing the left ventricle from the right.

What makes the discovery so unusual is that the Olmecs’ relatively sophisticated version of the heart came 2,500 years before the so-called father of anatomy, a Belgian named Andreas Vesalius, wrote “Fabrica.” The book, published in 1543, included what experts considered the earliest accurate images of the heart.

The Olmecs, Aztec for “people from the land of rubber,” certainly were not the only people to see a human heart in ancient times.

Archeologists have long known that the Mayans practiced human sacrifice, removing hearts from living people. The ancient Greeks allowed some human dissections after 400 B.C., breaking with a long-standing view that autopsies violated the purity of the dead body.

But if the ancients ever committed an anatomically correct image of the heart to pottery or canvas or papyrus, their work never survived.

All that remains are symbols: a Valentine-like heart placed in an elephant’s chest; Egyptian hieroglyphics depicting a heart in the shape of a vase; Roman decorations featuring hearts that would fit on today’s sappiest romantic greeting cards.

Bendersky, 68, has another, still unproven theory: The clay container shows that the Olmecs sacrificed humans--perhaps infants--long before the Mayans.

“The irony is that a fairly advanced concept, a motivation to depict a human heart, was driven by this very primitive ritual,” Bendersky said.

Carolyn Tate, an art history professor at Texas Tech University, is unsure whether the artwork proves that the Olmecs sacrificed humans. But she joins other experts in acknowledging that the container, if it is genuine, is the oldest image of the heart.

It comes from the earliest known North American civilization, scattered throughout southern Mexico and Central America from 1200 B.C. to 400 B.C.

The Olmec civilization was first discovered when an engineer came upon a colossal head sculpture in the volcanic mountains of eastern Mexico. Archeologists later found dozens of the monumental statues, some weighing many tons, from Veracruz on the Gulf of Mexico to Guerrero on the Pacific side.

The Olmecs created the rubber ball, appear to have understood astronomy and left behind distinctive art in jade and clay, including life-size images of infants and humans with the features of jaguars and crocodiles.

Bendersky’s article about the ceramic vessel wasn’t his first foray into art history. Two years ago he wrote an article in a scholarly journal, which attracted the attention of the New York Times, explaining his theory about the meaning of Raphael’s painting “The Transfiguration,” which pairs Jesus Christ’s transfiguration with a child having a seizure.

Bendersky, relying on his training as a physician, wrote that the boy in the painting did not suffer from epilepsy, as it had been previously interpreted, but was actually cured. Raphael, he said, meant to combine Christ’s victory over death with the boy’s triumph.

One leading authority on Renaissance art quoted by the New York Times said he believed that Bendersky had successfully decoded the painting.