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“The meeting of lips is the most perfect, the most divine sensation given to human beings, the highest limit of happiness.”
So wrote the 19e century French author Guy de Maupassant in his 1882 short story, “The Kiss.” He wasn’t alone in his flowery thoughts about kissing. Romantic kisses have long been celebrated in songs, poems and stories, commemorated in art and film.
No one knows for sure when people first discovered that mouth-to-mouth contact could be used for romance and erotic pleasure, but scientists reported in May 2023 that people locked lips at least 4,500 years ago. The findings, published in the journal Science, pushed the history of the practice back by about 1,000 years.
“Kissing has been practiced for much longer than many of us may have realized, or at least imagined,” says lead study author Dr. Troels Pank Arbøll, assistant professor of Assyriology – the study of Assyria and the rest of Mesopotamia – at the University of Copenhagen.
Thousands of clay tablets from Mesopotamia have survived to this day; their references to kissing shed light on romantic intimacy in the ancient world, the researchers reported.
“This fascinating case study adds to a growing body of scientific research on romantic/sexual kissing, helping us understand the origins of kissing in human social behavior and intimate life in particular,” said evolutionary biologist Dr. Justin R. Garcia, professor of gender. attends Indiana University Bloomington. Garcia, who researches the culture and evolution of human intimacy at the Kinsey Institute, was not involved in the study.
“Romantic and sexual behavioral experiences are part of larger patterns of human social behavior,” Garcia told CNN in an email. “Understanding how these behaviors express, change and evolve can help us better understand who we are today.”
When De Maupassant wrote his heartfelt descriptions of loving kisses, he probably didn’t think too deeply about how kissing arose in the first place among past civilizations. But the origins of this “most divine sensation” are deeply rooted in human history and evolution, and there is likely still much to be discovered about its role and meaning in ancient cultures, the study authors wrote.
Passionate kisses
Previously, the oldest recorded evidence of kissing was attributed to the Vedas, a group of Indian scriptures dating to about 1500 BC that are fundamental to the Hindu religion. One of the parts, the Rig Veda, describes how people hold their lips together. Erotic kissing was also discussed extensively in another ancient Indian text: the Kama Sutra, a guide to sexual pleasure from the third century AD. Modern scholars therefore concluded that romantic kisses probably originated in India.
But it was common knowledge among Assyriologists that clay tablets from the region mentioned kissing even earlier than it was described in India, Arbøll told CNN. However, few outside highly specialized academic circles knew such evidence existed, he added. In the study, Arbøll and co-author Dr. Sophie Lund Rasmussen, a research fellow at the biology department of the University of Oxford in Britain, about kisses engraved in Mesopotamian tablets dating back to 2500 BC.
“As an Assyriologist, I study cuneiform,” Arbøll said. Cuneiform script, in which characters are pressed into tablets using carved triangular reeds, was invented around 3200 BC. Early cuneiform writing was used by scribes for bookkeeping, Arbøll explained. But around 2600 BC – perhaps even earlier – people began writing down stories about their gods.
“In one of these myths we are given the description that these gods had intercourse and then kissed each other,” he said. “That is clear evidence of sexual romantic kissing.”
Within a few centuries, writing had become more widespread throughout Mesopotamia. With this came more accounts of everyday life, with mentions of kisses exchanged by married couples and by unmarried people as an expression of desire.
Some examples warned of the dangers of kissing; According to the study, kissing a priestess sworn to a form of celibacy would “deprive the kisser of the ability to speak.” Another ban dealt with the inappropriateness of kissing in the street; That this warning had to be given at all hinted that kissing was “a very mundane act,” even if it was preferably practiced in private, Arbøll said.
On thousands of cuneiform tablets, kissing is not the most mentioned topic, “but it is regularly confirmed,” he said.
Don’t talk, just kiss
Humans aren’t the only animals that kiss, that includes our closest primate relatives. Chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes) exchange kisses in greeting. For bonobos (Pan paniscus), kissing is part of their very frequent sex play; they copulate face-to-face and often engage in “intense French kissing,” wrote primatologist Frans BM De Waal, a behavioral biologist at Emory University in Atlanta.
It’s possible that romantic kissing evolved in primates as a way to evaluate the fitness of a potential mate, “via chemical signals communicated through saliva or breath,” Arbøll and Rasmussen wrote.
But kissing is not just fun, fun and enjoyment. A less pleasant side effect of kissing in humans is the spread of infectious diseases. Another study, written in July 2022 by more than twenty researchers from institutions in Europe, Britain and Russia, stated that the rapid emergence of a lineage of the herpes simplex virus HSV-1 in Europe about 5,000 years ago, “ may have been related to the introduction of new cultural practices such as the advent of sexual-romantic kissing,” following waves of migration to Europe from the Eurasian grasslands.
But Arbøll and Rasmussen suspected that romantic kissing was accepted in Bronze Age Europe, and not just because of migration. It is more likely, they wrote, that the practice of kissing was already at least superficially known to people in Europe, because it was common in Mesopotamia – and possibly in other parts of the ancient world – and not just limited to India .
“It must have been known in many ancient cultures,” Arbøll said. “Not necessarily practiced, but at least known.”
Kissing then and now
Unlike the kisses shared by parents and children, which are thought to be “ubiquitous among people across time and geography,” romantic kisses are not common everywhere. Even today, many cultures avoid romantic kissing, Arbøll and Rasmussen reported.
In a September 2015 study co-authored by Garcia, researchers examined 168 modern cultures around the world, finding that only 46% of those societies practiced kissing that was sexual or romantic. Such kissing, the authors reported, was much less common in foraging communities, and more likely to occur in societies with different social classes, “with more complex societies being more likely to kiss in this way.”
Although Arbøll and Rasmussen’s research suggests that romantic kissing was not uncommon in ancient Mesopotamia, the authors point out that there were still taboos about who could kiss and where they could do so – 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 was not always part of everyone’s expressions of intimacy, and still is not always,” Garcia said.
It’s also possible that if kissing was more widespread in ancient times than once thought, it “may have been more universal than in modern times,” Arbøll added. “It opens up a number of questions that are interesting for future research.”
Mindy Weisberger is a science writer and media producer whose work has appeared in the magazines LiveScience, Scientific American, and How It Works.
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