The new study, published this week in the journal Science, shows that kissing may have been widespread even in the ancient world.
This research provides evidence that “lip kissing has been documented in ancient Mesopotamia and Egypt” since at least 2500 BC.
Troels Bank Arbol said she began, together with the author participating in this research, Sophie Lund Rasmussen, to study how the spread of disease was affected by the adoption of the practice of kissing on the lips as a romantic expression.
Arbol is an Assyriologist specializing in Ancient Near Eastern studies at the University of Copenhagen, and Lund Rasmussen is a biologist at the University of Oxford.
The researchers concluded that the most recent studies cited an Indian source, dating to around 1500 BC. J.-C., as the first reference to the “romantic kiss”.
“I learned that there were earlier materials from ancient Mesopotamia (Iraq),” Arbol, who studies cuneiform writing on ancient clay tablets, told AFP.
He added that although the evidence had already been collected in the 1980s, “it appears that the information was never adopted in other areas”.
In the thousands of ancient cuneiform texts available, scholars have found relatively few references to romantic kisses.
However, they noted, “There are clear examples showing that kissing was considered a normal part of a romantic relationship in ancient times.”
The researchers wrote that the texts studied indicated that “kissing was something that couples did”, but also that “kissing was considered part of an unmarried person’s sexual desire when in love”.
The researchers distinguished between the “friendly kiss of parents” and the “romantic kiss”.
While the former appears to be ubiquitous across time and geography, the latter “is not present in all cultures around the world”.
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