The oldest recorded kiss on the lips has scientists confused

The results, published in the journal Science, push back the history of the practice of kissing by about 1,000 years, CNN notes.

“Kissing has been practiced for much longer than perhaps many of us realized or at least thought about it,” says lead author Dr. Troels Pank Arbell, associate professor of Assyriology – the study of Assyria and the rest of Mesopotamia – at the University of Copenhagen.

Thousands of clay tablets from Mesopotamia survive to this day; Their references to kissing shed light on romantic intimacy in the ancient world, researchers report.

“This fascinating case study adds to the growing body of scientific research on romantic/sexual kissing and helps us understand the origins of kissing in human social behavior and intimacy in particular,” said evolutionary biologist Dr. Justin R. Garcia, professor of gender studies at Indiana University. in Bloomington. Garcia, who researches culture and the evolution of human intimacy at the Kinsey Institute.

“Experiences of romantic and sexual behavior are part of a person’s broader patterns of social behavior,” Garcia told CNN via email. “Understanding how these behaviors express themselves, change and evolve helps us better understand who we are today.”

When de Maupassant wrote his heartfelt descriptions of amorous kisses, he probably didn’t think too much about how kissing arose among past civilizations in the first place. But the origins of this “most divine sensation” are deeply rooted in human history and evolution, and much about its role and meaning in ancient cultures likely remains to be discovered, the study authors write.

Previously, the oldest recorded evidence of kissing was attributed to the Vedas, a group of Indian sacred texts that date back to around 1500 BC. and are fundamental to the Hindu religion. One of the volumes, the Rig Veda, describes how people touch their lips. Erotic kissing is also described in great detail in another ancient Indian text: the Kama Sutra, a manual on sexual pleasure dating back to the third century AD. Thus, modern scholars have concluded that romantic kissing probably originated in India.

But it was widely known among Assyriologists that clay tablets from the region mentioned kissing even earlier than it was described in India, Arbell told CNN. However, outside of highly specialized academic circles, few people were aware of the existence of such evidence, he added. For the study, Arbell and co-author Dr. Sophie Lund Rasmussen, a research fellow in the Department of Biology at the University of Oxford in the UK, wrote about kisses depicted on Mesopotamian tablets dating back to 2500 BC.

“As an Assyriologist, I study cuneiform,” says Arbell. Cuneiform writing, in which characters are pressed onto tablets using cut triangular reeds, was invented around 3200 BC. Ancient cuneiform was used by scribes for bookkeeping, Arbell explains. But around 2600 BC—perhaps even earlier—people began writing down stories about their gods.

“In one of these myths we find a description of these gods copulating and then kissing,” he said. “This is clear evidence of a sexy romantic kiss.”

Over the course of several centuries, writing became more widespread throughout Mesopotamia. With this came more records of daily life, with references to kisses exchanged between married couples and unmarried people as expressions of desire.

Some examples talked about the dangers of kissing; According to the study, it was believed that a kiss from a celibate priestess “deprives the kisser of the ability to speak.” Another prohibition concerned the indecency of kissing on the street; that the warning had to be given at all hinted that kissing was a “very everyday activity,” albeit one that was preferably practiced in private, Arbell said.

On thousands of cuneiform tablets, kissing is not the most mentioned topic, “but it is confirmed regularly,” he said.

Humans aren’t the only creatures that kiss; our closest primate relatives do the same. Chimpanzees exchange kisses as a greeting. For bonobos, kissing is part of their very frequent sexual play; they copulate face to face and often engage in “intense tongue kissing,” writes primatologist France B.M. De Waal is a behavioral biologist at Emory University in Atlanta.

It’s possible that romantic kissing evolved in primates as a way to assess the suitability of a potential partner “through chemical signals transmitted in saliva or breath,” Arbell and Rasmussen write.

But kissing is not only about sociability, fun and pleasure. One of the less pleasant side effects of kissing in humans is the spread of infectious diseases. Another study, published in July 2022 by more than two dozen researchers from institutions in Europe, the UK and Russia, said that the rapid spread of the HSV-1 lineage of the herpes simplex virus in Europe about 5,000 years ago was “potentially associated with the introduction of new cultural practices, such as the emergence of sexually romantic kissing,” which followed waves of migration to Europe from the Eurasian grasslands.

But Arbell and Rasmussen suspected that romantic kissing became common in Bronze Age Europe, and not just because of migration. More likely, they wrote, the practice of kissing was already at least vaguely familiar to people in Europe, because it was common in Mesopotamia—and perhaps other parts of the ancient world—and not limited to India.

“This must have been known in many ancient cultures,” Arbell said. “Not necessarily practiced, but at least known.”

Unlike kisses exchanged between parents and children, which are thought to be “common among people across time and geography,” romantic kisses are not common everywhere. Even today, many cultures avoid romantic kissing, Arbell and Rasmussen report.

In a September 2015 study co-authored by Garcia, researchers surveyed 168 modern cultures around the world and found that only 46% of those societies practiced kissing in a sexual or romantic way. Such kissing, the authors reported, was much less common in foraging societies and was more likely to occur in societies with distinct social classes, “with more complex societies more likely to kiss in this manner.”

Although Arbell and Rasmussen’s research suggests that romantic kissing was not unusual in ancient Mesopotamia, the authors point out that there were still taboos about who could kiss and where they could do it, and that romantic kissing was far from a universal experience. in all cultures.

“This article is an important reminder that the widespread kissing we see all around us today in Western society has not always been, and still is not, always a part of everyone’s display of intimacy,” Garcia stresses.

It’s also possible that if kissing was more common in the ancient world than previously thought, it was “perhaps more universal than in modern times,” Arbell added. “This opens up some interesting questions for future research.”