Humans Kissed At Least 4,500 Years Ago, Ancient Texts Reveal

Sexual kissing was practiced in ancient Mesopotamia and Egypt at least 4,500 years ago, according to a review of ancient texts.

There is considerable debate about when humans first started kissing romantically. Many sources say the earliest evidence of sexual kissing is found in Sanskrit texts written in what is now India around 3,500 years ago. Some scholars have suggested that sexual kissing spread from there around the world, and Alexander the Great’s conquests often played a role in this spread.

The idea that sexual kissing spread around the world from a single location has, in turn, been linked to changes in the spread of diseases that can be transmitted orally. For example, an article published last year suggested that herpes simplex virus 1which causes cold sores, has become more common because of the “advent of the sexual-romantic kiss”.

But evidence from Mesopotamia and Egypt suggests sex kisses emerged independently in many places and didn’t suddenly spread around the world, says Troels Pank Arboll at the University of Copenhagen in Denmark. “It shows that he was known in a much wider area of ​​the ancient world than the people who formulated these theories envisioned,” he says.

This has been known for decades by the few experts who can read the cuneiform writing system used by several ancient civilizations, but not more widely, says Arbøll. “In the general scientific community, people weren’t aware of this evidence because it’s not cited anywhere.”

Thus, Arbøll and his wife, a biologist Sophie Lund Rasmussen at the University of Oxford, decided to write a paper outlining the overlooked evidence.

While the kiss is rarely mentioned in Mesopotamian texts, these mentions show that it was considered an ordinary part of romantic intimacy in ancient times, says Arbøll. For example, a text from around 3800 years ago describes how a married woman was nearly unfaithful after a kiss. Another text from the same period describes an unmarried woman swearing to avoid kissing and having sex with a man.

“Given the geographical distribution, I think [sexual kissing] had to have several origins,” explains Arbøll. “It’s not something that comes from just one place.”

He and Rasmussen also point out that there is tentative evidence that modern humans and neanderthals kissed, or at least exchanged saliva somehow. Moreover, bonobos also engage in mouth-to-mouth sexual kissing. So it’s possible that people have been kissing sexually for much longer than written history suggests. “I think it’s very likely that it goes back a long way,” says Arbøll.

However, a 2015 study by Guillaume Jankowiak at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, and colleagues found no evidence of sexual kissing in hunter-gatherer societies.

“My hunch is that kissing originated or was discovered among the elite in complex societies,” says Jankowiak. The elite were able to seek pleasure and turn sex into an erotic encounter, he says.

Jankowiak found that sex kisses are more common in cold climates. This may be because in places where people’s bodies are covered in clothing, the face is the only area available for touch, he says.