Valentine’s Day: When did humans start kissing?

“Ancient lovers believed a kiss would literally unite their souls because the spirit was said to be carried in one’s breath,” writes author Eve Glicksman. Romantic kisses may be a form of public display of affection in modern times, but they have a long history. The exact moment when humans discovered the sensual pleasure of kissing is unknown, but scientists believe the first recorded instances of kissing were found on 2,400 BC clay tablets from Mesopotamia. Let’s take a look. The first kiss in history Lead study author Dr Troels Pank Arbøll, an assistant professor of Assyriology at the University of Copenhagen, said, “Kissing has been practiced much longer than perhaps a lot of us realised, or at least had thought about.” Thousands of clay tablets from Mesopotamia survive to the present; their references to kissing shed light on romantic intimacy in the ancient world, the researchers reported. The findings by Arbøll and co-author Dr Sophie Lund Rasmussen, a research fellow in the department of biology at Oxford University in the UK, published in the journal Science, pushed back the history of the kissing practice by about 1,000 years. According to The New York Times, they said clay tablet from Mesopotamia was first unearthed in the ancient Sumerian city of Nippur in 1899, and named after George Barton, the professor of Semitic languages at Bryn Mawr College, who translated it 19 years later. De Maupassant most likely wasn’t very concerned with how kissing originated in the first place among ancient civilizations when he wrote his profound accounts of passionate kisses. But the origins of this “most divine sensation” are deeply rooted in human history and evolution, and there is likely much about its role and significance in ancient cultures that is yet to be discovered, the study authors wrote, according to CNN. Debunking the myths About 3200 BC, the art of cuneiform writing was developed, in which characters are inscribed onto tablets using triangle-shaped reeds. Arbøll clarified that scribes kept books in early cuneiform. However, people started writing down stories about their gods approximately 2600 BC, or possibly much earlier. There were stories about married couples exchanging kisses and single people kissing each other as an expression of desire. “In one of these myths, we get this description that these gods had intercourse and then kissed. That’s clear evidence of sexual romantic kissing,” he said, according to the report. A few instances warned against kissing; the study states that kissing a priestess who had sworn celibacy “was believed to deprive the kisser of the ability to speak.” Another prohibition dealt with the inappropriateness of sharing a kiss on the street; Arbøll stated that the fact that this warning was necessary at all suggested that sharing a kiss was “a very everyday sort of action,” though one that was best done in private. Although it isn’t the most often discussed topic among thousands of Cuneiform tablets, “kissing is attested regularly,” he said. Not all kissing is social or pleasant. The spread of infectious diseases is one of its negative effects. The rapid rise of the herpes simplex virus HSV-1 lineage in Europe approximately 5,000 years ago was “potentially linked to the introduction of new cultural practices such as the advent of sexual-romantic kissing,” according to CNN which cited a different study published in July 2022 by more than two dozen researchers from institutions in Europe, the UK, and Russia. This study followed waves of migration into Europe from the Eurasian grasslands. However, Arbøll and Rasmussen surmised that it was not just migration that led to the acceptance of passionate kissing in Bronze Age Europe. They concluded that it was more likely that the custom of kissing was already vaguely known to people in Europe due to its widespread use in Mesopotamia and perhaps other ancient regions of the world, rather than being limited to India. “It must have been known in a lot of ancient cultures,” Arbøll said. “Not necessarily practiced, but at least known.” How kissing has evolved with time Arbøll and Rasmussen claim that romantic kisses are not culturally universal, in contrast to the friendly-parental kisses that are believed to be “ubiquitous among societies the world over.” In a September 2015 study that Garcia co-authored, researchers examined 168 contemporary civilisations globally and discovered that just 46 per cent of those societies engaged in romantic or sexual kissing. According to the authors, these kinds of kissing were more widespread in cultures with different social classes than in foraging communities, “with more complex societies being more likely to kiss in this manner.” The authors note that there were still taboos about who might kiss and where, and that romantic kissing was by no means a universal experience across all cultures, even if their most recent study indicates that it was not unusual for people to share passionate kisses in ancient Mesopotamia. “This article is an important reminder that widespread kissing we see represented all around us in western society today was not always, and is still not always, a part of everyone’s displays of intimacy,” the report quoted Garcia as saying. It is also possible that if kissing in the ancient world was more widely distributed than once thought, it was “perhaps more universal than in modern times. It opens some questions that are interesting for future research,” Arbøll added. Mentions of kisses in Indian scripture A previous hypothesis suggested the Vedas — a collection of Indian scriptures that constitute the core of Hinduism and date back to approximately 1500 BC — were said to feature the earliest known accounts of kissing. The Rig Veda, one of the volumes, mentions people locking their lips together. A third-century AD handbook to sexual pleasure, the Kama Sutra, is another ancient Indian text that goes into considerable depth about erotic kissing. Thus, modern researchers concluded that passionate kisses most likely originated in India. However, Arbøll told CNN that Assyriologists were well aware that the region’s clay tablets discussed kissing even before it was documented in India. He said, nevertheless, that few people outside of extremely specialised academic circles were aware that this kind of evidence even existed. With inputs from agencies