Sculpture depicting Pharaoh Ramesses and Queen Nefertiti embracing in Luxor Temple, Egypt
Agung Parameswara/Getty Images
A survey of ancient documents shows that sexual kissing was practiced in ancient Mesopotamia and Egypt at least 4,500 years ago.
There is considerable debate as to when humans began kissing in a romantic way. According to many sources, the earliest evidence of sexual kissing is in Sanskrit texts written in what is now India about 3,500 years ago. Some researchers suggest that sexual kissing spread around the world from there, and it is often said that the conquest of Alexander the Great played a role in this spread.
The idea that sexual kissing spread from one place to the rest of the world is thought to be related to changes in the prevalence of diseases that can be transmitted by mouth. For example, a paper published last year suggested that herpes simplex virus type 1, which causes cold sores, became more common due to the “appearance of sexual and romantic kissing.”
But evidence from Mesopotamia and Egypt suggests that sexual kisses originated independently in many places and didn’t suddenly spread worldwide, says Troels Pank Arbol of the University of Copenhagen, Denmark. says. “This shows that it was known to a much wider area of the ancient world than the people constructing these theories think,” he says.
This had been known for decades to the few experts who could read the cuneiform script used by some ancient civilizations, but it wasn’t as widely known, Arbor says. “People were unaware of this evidence in the general scientific community because it was not cited anywhere.”
So Arbor and his wife, Oxford University biologist Sophie Rand Rasmussen, set out to write a paper explaining the overlooked evidence.
Kissing is rarely mentioned in Mesopotamian literature, but these references show that in ancient times kissing was considered a normal part of romantic intimacy, Arbor said. For example, a nearly 3,800-year-old document describes how a married woman approached infidelity after a kiss. Another document from the same period shows unmarried women swearing to avoid kissing or having sex with men.
“Considering the geographical distribution, [sexual kissing] There must have been multiple origins,” says Arbol. “It didn’t start in one place.”
He and Rasmussen also point to preliminary evidence that modern humans and Neanderthals kissed, or at least exchanged saliva in some form. In addition, bonobos also perform mouth-to-mouth sexual kissing. So it’s possible that people have been sexually kissing for far longer than written history suggests. “I think it’s very likely that it goes back a long time,” says Arbor.
But a 2015 study by William Jankowiak and colleagues at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas found no evidence of sexual kissing in hunter-gatherer societies.
“My hunch is that kissing may have started or been discovered among the elite of a complex society,” says Jankowiak. The elite could pursue pleasure and turn sex into a sensual encounter, he says.
Jankowiak found that sexual kisses are more common in cold climates. This could be because where people’s bodies are covered in clothing, the only zone that can be touched is the face, he says.
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