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 as to when humans began kissing romantically. Many sources say that the earliest evidence of sexual kissing is found in Sanskrit texts written in what is now India some 3,500 years ago. Some researchers have suggested that sexual kissing spread from there throughout the world, and the conquests of Alexander the Great are often said to have played a role in this spread.
The idea that sexual kissing spread across the globe from a single location has, in turn, been linked to changes in the spread of diseases that can be transmitted orally. For example, a paper published last year suggested that herpes simplex virus 1, which causes cold sores, has become much more common. for “the advent of sexual-romantic kissing”.
But evidence from Mesopotamia and Egypt suggests that sexual kissing arose independently in many places and did not suddenly spread across the globe, he says. Troels Pank Arboll at the University of Copenhagen in Denmark. “It shows that it was known over a much wider area in the ancient world than the people who formulated these theories have considered,” he says.
This has been known for decades by the few experts who can read the cuneiform writing system used by various ancient civilizations, but not more widely, Arbøll says. “In the general scientific community, people were not aware of this evidence because it is not cited anywhere.”
So Arbøll and his wife, a biologist Sophie Lund-Rasmussen at Oxford University, he decided to write a paper describing the overlooked evidence.
While kissing is rarely referenced in Mesopotamian texts, those mentions show that it was considered an ordinary part of romantic intimacy in ancient times, Arbøll says. For example, a text from about 3,800 years ago describes how a married woman was about to be unfaithful after a kiss. Another text from the same time describes an unmarried woman who vows to avoid kissing and having sex with a man.
“Taking into account the geographical distribution, I think [sexual kissing] it must have had multiple origins,” says Arbøll. “It’s not something that originated in one place.”
He and Rasmussen also point out that there is tentative evidence that modern humans and neanderthals kissed, or at least we exchange spit in some way. Additionally, bonobos also engage in mouth-to-mouth sexual kissing. So it’s possible that people have been sexually kissing 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 William 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 arose or was discovered among the elite in complex societies,” says Jankowiak. The elite were able to pursue pleasure and turn sex into an erotic encounter, he says.
Jankowiak found that sexual kissing is more common in cold weather. This may be because in places where people’s bodies are covered with clothing, the face is the only area available to touch, he says.
