The earliest recorded kiss

WHEN was the first kiss? Recent papers have suggested that romantic kissing began 3 500 years ago, in what is now India. But a new review paper in the journal Science says this style of kissing is also mentioned in clay tablets from Mesopotamia that predate the Indian texts by about a thousand years.

Danish researchers Troels Pank Arboll and Sophie Lund Rasmussen say the behaviour did not emerge abruptly or in a specific society, but appears to have been practised in multiple ancient cultures, including Egypt.

They say “the act of kissing may have played a secondary and unintentional role throughout history” by enabling disease-causing micro-organisms to spread from one mouth to another. But the kiss “cannot be regarded as a sudden biological trigger” that led to societies being deluged by pathogens.

The researchers launched their search for the earliest kiss last year while discussing a paper on the ancient DNA of the herpes simplex virus. The herpes paper had noted a shift in the transmission of the virus during the Bronze Age (2000 to 700 BC), “potentially linked” to new cultural practices “such as the advent of sexual-romantic kissing”.

Arboll, an assistant professor of Assyriology at the University of Copenhagen who studies ancient accounts of medical diagnoses, prescriptions and healing rituals, had little trouble finding accounts of kissing from Mesopotamia written in the Sumerian and Akkadian languages.

He and Rasmussen, an ecologist at the University of Oxford’s Wildlife Conservation Research Unit and Aalborg University in Denmark, noted too a calcite sculpture in the British Museum, the Ain Sakhri Lovers, found in caves near Bethlehem and estimated to be about 11 000 years old.

In her The Science of Kissing, Sheril Kirshenbaum reported the earliest literary evidence for human kissing dated from India’s Vedic Sanskrit texts around 1500 BC. But there is debate among researchers about whether kissing began in one place and spread or had “numerous independent origins”, as Arboll and Rasmussen write. |