Who kissed first in history? – 02/14/2024 – Science

This is a love story. During the spring of 2008, long before evidence of humanity’s first recorded kiss was produced, Sophie Lund Rasmussen and Troels Pank Arboll shared their first kiss as they said goodbye at night. They had met a week earlier in a pub near the University of Copenhagen, where they were studying.

“I had asked my cousin if he knew any cool single guys with long hair and a long beard,” Rasmussen said. “And he said, ‘Of course, I’ll introduce you to one.'”

Arboll, in turn, was looking for someone who shared his interest in Assyriology, which involves the study of Mesopotamian languages.

“Few people know what an Assyriologist actually does,” Arboll told her.

“I know,” replied Rasmussen, who had taken some of the same classes as him.

“When I heard that, I knew she was the right person,” said Arboll, now a professor of Assyriology at the university.

Three years later, they got married.

Rasmussen is now an ecologist at the wildlife conservation research unit at the University of Oxford and at Aalborg University in Denmark.

In 2022, over dinner, the couple discussed a new genetic study that linked modern variants of herpes to mouth-to-mouth kissing in the Bronze Age, from 3300 BC to 1200 BC.

In the article’s supplementary materials, a brief history of the kiss pointed to South Asia as the place of origin and traced the first literary recorded kiss to 1500 BC, when Vedic Sanskrit manuscripts were being transcribed from oral history.

The researcher, from the University of Cambridge, suggested that the custom — a precursor to lip kissing that involved rubbing and pressing noses together — evolved into intense kissing. She noted that around 300 BC — when the Indian sex manual the Kama Sutra was published — kissing spread across the Mediterranean with the return of Alexander the Great’s troops from northern India.

But the couple believed that this was not the beginning of the kiss story. “I told Sophie that I knew of even older accounts written in the Sumerian and Akkadian languages,” said Arboll, whose specialty is ancient accounts of medical diagnoses, prescriptions and healing rituals.

“So after dinner we checked again,” Rasmussen said.

They consulted cuneiform texts on clay tablets from Mesopotamia (present-day Iraq and Syria) and Egypt for clear examples of intimate kisses. The investigation resulted in a commentary recently published in Science magazine that dispelled the hypothesis that people from a specific region were the first to kiss.

Danish researchers maintain that, since at least the late third millennium BC, kissing was a widespread and well-established part of romance in the Middle East. “Kissing was not a custom that suddenly appeared in a single location,” Arboll said. “Instead, it appears to have been common across cultures.”

Arboll and Rasmussen proposed that the earliest account of kissing was recorded on the Barton Cylinder, a clay tablet dating back to around 2400 BC. The object was discovered in the ancient Sumerian city of Nippur in 1899 and was named after George Barton, a professor of Semitic languages ​​at Bryn Mawr College, who translated it 19 years later. It is housed in the Museum of Archeology and Anthropology at the University of Pennsylvania, where, from 1922 to 1931, the docent taught Semitic languages ​​and the history of religion.

The artifact’s narrative involves the Sumerian creation myth and problems with the food supply in Nippur, the original religious capital of Babylon and the place of worship of Enlil, ruler of the cosmos. In the second column of text, a male deity, possibly Enlil, has sexual relations with the mother goddess Ninhursag, Enlil’s sister, and then kisses her. In the midst of this game, the male deity plants the seed of “seven pairs of gods” in her womb.

Gonzalo Rubio, an Assyriologist at Pennsylvania State University, said the most compelling part of the story is the sequence of events. “In representations of kissing in Sumerian literature, the subjects have sexual intercourse first and only then kiss,” he said. “It’s kind of post-game rather than foreplay.”

Was a Sumerian kiss just a kiss? Arboll said that in the early passages, the kiss was described in relation to erotic acts, with the lips as the location. In Akkadian, a Semitic language related to today’s Hebrew and Arabic, he and Rasmussen found that references to kissing fell into two categories: friendly-paternal and romantic-sexual.

The first is a display of familial affection, respect, or submission, as when a royal subject kisses the feet of a ruler. “Sexual-romantic kissing occurs in relation to a sexual act or in relation to love,” said Arboll. Unlike the friendly-paternal variety, it is not culturally universal.

“Lip kissing has been observed in chimpanzees and bonobos, our closest living relatives,” Rasmussen added. While chimpanzee platonic kissing determines compatibility, bonobos caress each other for sexual arousal—their erotic contact ranges from oral sex to intense tongue twisting. “The kissing practices of these primates suggest something fundamental that goes back to human history,” Rasmussen said.

The researcher said she believes that kissing evolved as a way of evaluating potential partners through their smell.

“With both humans and hedgehogs, it’s all about finding the strongest, healthiest mate to produce strong, healthy offspring,” she said. “So, unconsciously, you evaluate a person’s suitability through chemical signals, like bad breath, which can indicate bad teeth, which can indicate bad genes.”

Rasmussen remembered that first tender kiss with Arboll, which smelled like the hibiscus tea she had just prepared for him. What is a kiss? In memory of her, she echoed a line from poet Robert Herrick: “The safe, sweet cement, glue and lime of love.”