by Sign up for CNN’s Wonder Theory science newsletter. Explore the universe with news on exciting discoveries, scientific advances and more.
“The meeting of the lips is the most perfect sensation, the most divine sensation given to humans, the upper limit of happiness.”
So wrote the 19th century French author Guy de Maupassant in his 1882 short story, “The Kiss.” He was not 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 realized that mouth-to-mouth contact could be used for love and erotic pleasure, but scientists reported in May 2023 that people were locking lips 4,500 years ago on the least. The findings, published in the journal Science, put the history of the practice back about 1,000 years.
“Kissing has been practiced for far longer than many of us may have realized, or at least thought about,” said 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 survive 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, and helps us to understand more specifically the origins of kissing in human social behavior and personal life,” said the evolutionary biologist Dr. Justin R. Garcia, professor of gender. studies at Indiana University in Bloomington. Garcia, who investigates the culture and evolution of human solidarity at the Kinsey Institute, was not involved in the research.
“Romantic and sexual behavior experiences are part of larger patterns of human social behavior,” Garcia told CNN in an email. “A better understanding of how these behaviors express themselves, change and evolve helps us better understand who we are today.”
When de Maupassant wrote his heartfelt description of loving kisses, he was probably not thinking too hard about how kissing first arose among the civilizations of the past. But the origins of this “divine sense” are deeply rooted in human history and evolution, and it is likely that much about its role and importance in ancient cultures remains to be discovered, the study authors wrote.
Passionate kisses
Previously, the oldest recorded evidence of kissing was attributed to the Vedas, a group of Indian scriptural texts dating back to around 1500 BC. and which is the basis of the Hindu religion. One of the volumes, the Rig Veda, describes people touching their lips together. The erotic kiss was also featured in detail in another ancient Indian text: the Kama Sutra, a guide to sexual pleasure from the third century AD. So modern scholars have come to the conclusion that romantic kisses probably originated in India.
But among Assyriologists, it was widely known that clay tablets from the region mentioned kissing even earlier than it was described in India, Arbøll told CNN. Outside of highly specialized academic circles, however, few knew that such evidence existed, he said. In the study, Arbøll and co-author Dr. Sophie Lund Rasmussen, a research fellow in the biology department at the University of Oxford in the United Kingdom, about kisses that were inscribed in Mesopotamian tablets dating to 2500 BC.
“As an Assyriologist, I study cuneiform writing,” said Arbøll. Cuneiform, in which characters are pressed into tablets using triangular cut reeds, was invented around 3200 BC. Arbøll explained the early cuneiform used by scribes for bookkeeping. But around the year 2600 BC. – perhaps even earlier – people began to record stories about their gods.
“In one of these myths, we find this description that these gods had intercourse and then they kissed,” he said. “That’s clear evidence of a romantic sexual kiss.”
Within a few hundred years, writing had become more widespread throughout Mesopotamia. With that came more records of everyday life, with kisses being traded by married couples and singles as an expression of desire.
Certain examples warned of the dangers of the kiss; to kiss a priestess sworn to a type of celibacy “which is believed to remove from the kiss the ability to speak,” according to the study. Another ban addressed the impropriety of kissing in the street; that this warning had to be done at all, suggested that kissing was a “very strong daily act”, although it was best practiced in private, Arbøll said.
Across the thousands of cuneiform tablets, kissing is not the most mentioned subject, “but it is regularly attested,” he said.
Don’t talk, just kiss
Humans aren’t the only animals to kiss – so are our closest primate relatives. Chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes) trade kisses as greetings. In the case of bonobos (Paniscus), kissing is a very frequent part of their sexual play; they copulate face-to-face and often engage in “intense tongue kissing,” writes primatologist Frans BM De Waal, a behavioral biologist at Emory University in Atlanta.
Romantic kissing may have evolved in primates as a way to assess the fitness of a potential partner, “through chemical cues expressed in saliva or breath,” Arbøll and Rasmussen wrote.
But kissing is not sociability, fun and pleasure. One less pleasant side effect of kissing people is the spread of infectious disease. Another study, authored in July 2022 by more than two dozen researchers from institutions in Europe, the United Kingdom and Russia, said that a rapid lineage of the herpes simplex virus HSV-1 may have appeared in Europe around 5,000 years ago, ” possible connection. with the introduction of new cultural practices such as the advent of sexual-romantic kissing,” following waves of migration into Europe from the Eurasian grasslands.
But Arbøll and Rasmussen suspected that the romantic kiss was accepted in Bronze Age Europe, and not just because of migration. It is more likely, they wrote, that the practice of kissing was at least already familiar to people in Europe because it was common in Mesopotamia – and perhaps elsewhere in the ancient world – and was not limited to India only.
“It must have been known in many ancient cultures,” Arbøll said. “Not necessarily practiced, but at least known.”
Kiss now and now
Unlike the kisses shared between parents and children, which are considered to be “ubiquitous among people across time and geography,” romantic kisses are not common everywhere. Even today, many cultures shun romantic kissing, Arbøll and Rasmussen reported.
In a September 2015 study co-authored by Garcia, researchers surveyed 168 modern cultures around the world, finding that only 46% of those societies practiced kissing that was sexual or romantic. The authors reported that such kissing was much less common in foraging communities, and was more likely to be found in societies with distinct social classes, “complex societies are more likely to kiss in this way” .
Although Arbøll and Rasmussen’s study 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 the romantic kissing is far from a universal experience across all cultures. .
“This article is an important reminder that the widespread kissing we see displayed all around us in western society today was not always, and still is not, always part of everyone’s relationship displays, ” Garcia said.
It’s also possible that if kissing in the ancient world was more widespread than once thought, it was “perhaps more universal than it is today,” Arbøll added. “It opens up some interesting questions for future research.”
Mindy Weisberger is a science writer and media producer whose work has appeared in Live Science, Scientific American and How It Works magazine.
For more CNN news and newsletters create an account at CNN.com
