Study: Humans began romantic kissing at least 4,500 years ago
The couple kiss while watching the full moon rise near a lookout at the World War I Museum in Kansas City, USA. 2019
A recent study has found that the earliest records of kissing as an element of romance date back 4,500 years, a millennium earlier than previously thought.
A 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 that it began, with the author participating in this research, Sophie Lund Rasmussen, to study how the spread of diseases 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 a source from India, dating back to around 1500 BC, as the first reference to "romantic sexual kissing".
"I learned that there was earlier material from ancient Mesopotamia," Arbol, who studies cuneiform writing on ancient clay tablets as part of his work, told AFP, adding that although the evidence was already collected in the 1980s, "it seems that the information It has not been adopted at all in other fields."
In the thousands of available ancient cuneiform texts, the researchers found relatively few references to romantic kissing, but note that "there are clear examples that show that kissing was considered a normal part of romantic intimacy in ancient times."
The researchers wrote that the texts studied indicated that "kissing was something couples did," but also that "a kiss was considered part of the sexual desire of an unmarried person when in love."
The researchers distinguished between "friendly kissing of parents" and "romantic sexual kissing", while the former seems to exist everywhere across time and geography, the latter "is not present in all cultures of the world."
Source: websites