When did humans start kissing on the lips? – 06/01/2023 – Balance

Kissing on the mouth is such a natural and common act in many current societies that it is easily trivialized.

But it’s actually unclear if people have always kissed or if it only started to happen in the relatively recent past.

The fact is that the history and motives of the kiss are more complex than one might imagine.

In an article published in the scientific journal Science, we analyze significant amounts of overlooked evidence that challenge current beliefs that the first recorded romantic-sexual kissing took place in India, around 1500 BC.

Rather, kissing on the mouth has been documented in ancient Mesopotamia – present-day Iraq and Syria – since at least 2500 BC.

This basically means that the recorded history of romantic-sexual kissing is at least 1,000 years older than the earliest known date.

Why do we kiss?

Evolutionary anthropologists have suggested that kissing on the lips evolved to assess the suitability of a potential mate, via chemical signals transmitted in saliva or breath.

Other suggested purposes for kissing include eliciting feelings of attachment and facilitating sexual arousal.

Kissing on the lips is also observed among our closest living relatives, the chimpanzees and bonobos. This suggests that the behavior may be much older than the current earliest evidence in humans.

People in ancient Mesopotamia may have invented writing, although its invention in ancient Egypt was also more or less contemporary.

The oldest Mesopotamian scripture is from around 3200 BC, from the city of Uruk, now in southern Iraq.

This writing, called cuneiform, was inscribed on wet clay tablets with the aid of wedge-shaped bamboo styluses.

Originally, the script was used to take notes in Sumerian, a language with no known relation to any other.

It was later adapted to write in Akkadian, an ancient Semitic language.

Although the earliest texts we find are primarily concerned with administrative practices and largely reflect the mechanics of bureaucracy, people developed this mode of writing in subsequent centuries to include other genres of texts.

In the first half of the third millennium BC, myths and spells materialize in these texts and, later, in private documents about common people.

Some of the oldest sources that mention kissing on the mouth can be found in mythological texts about acts of the gods dating back to approximately 2500 BC.

first records

In one of the oldest examples, depicted on the so-called Barton Cylinder, a Mesopotamian clay artifact with cuneiform inscriptions, two deities are said to have had intercourse and kissed: “…with the goddess Ninhursag he had intercourse . He kissed her. And filled her womb with the semen of seven twins “.

Later sources, such as proverbs, an erotic dialogue between a man and a woman, and a legal text, give the overall impression that kissing in the context of sex, family, and friendship was probably a common part of everyday life in central areas of ancient times. Middle East, from the end of the third millennium BC onwards.

Still, it seems that romantic-sexual kissing in the street may have been frowned upon, and it is possible that it was practiced preferentially between married couples.

Society likely had a number of social-type norms regarding ideal behavior.

But the fact that such norms exist points to a widespread practice.

Single point of origin?

Evidence suggests that kissing on the lips was practiced at least in the ancient Near East and India.

This is in contrast to previous observations about humanity’s earliest kissing history.

A manuscript from India dating to around 1500 BC, for example, was previously used to suggest that kissing was brought to the West as a cultural practice from there.

The oldest evidence from Mesopotamia indicates that we can rule out this scenario.

Considering the wide geographic distribution of romantic-sexual kissing in antiquity, we believe that kissing had multiple origins.

And even if one were looking for a single point of origin for the kiss, one would have to look for it millennia ago, in prehistoric times.

A recent anthropological study has shown that romantic-sexual kissing is not universal.

However, there is ancient written documentation suggesting a trend towards its practice in societies with complex social hierarchies.

This raises a question about how widely used sexual kissing was in the ancient world, especially in societies that cannot be traced because they did not use writing.

Although some societies may not have practiced romantic-sexual kissing, we argue that it must have been known in most ancient cultures, due to cultural contacts, for example.

But if future research shows that kissing on the mouth cannot be considered nearly universal in the ancient world, it will be interesting to consider the reasons why this was not a common practice.

Surprisingly, the history and culture of kissing is complex, with many aspects yet to be revealed.

This article was originally published on the academic news site The Conversation and republished here under a Creative Commons license. Read the original version here (in English).

This text was published here

Sophie Lund Rasmussen is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the University of Oxford, UK. Troels Pank Arbøll is Assistant Professor of Assyriology at the University of Copenhagen, Denmark.