A new study, published this week in the journal Science, concluded that this practice was probably widespread even in ancient times.
He also presented evidence that “kissing on the lips has been documented in ancient Mesopotamia and Egypt” from at least 2,500 BC.
Troels Pank Arboll said that he and his co-author, Sophie Lund Rasmussen, began to examine how the introduction of kissing on the lips as a romantic expression could affect the spread of disease.
Arboll is an Assyriologist, a specialist in ancient Near Eastern studies, at the University of Copenhagen. Lund Rasmussen is a biologist at the University of Oxford.
They both discovered that the most recent studies cited a source from India, dated to around 1,500 BC, as the first reference to “sexual-romantic kissing.”
“I knew there was older material from ancient Mesopotamia,” Arboll, who studies cuneiform writing on ancient clay tablets, told AFP.
Although this evidence was collected in the 1980s, “it appears that the information was never adopted in other fields,” he added.
The researchers found relatively few references to romantic kissing in the thousands of ancient cuneiform texts available.
However, “there are clear examples illustrating that kissing was considered a common part of romantic intimacy in ancient times.”
The texts studied imply “that kissing was something that married couples did” but also that “kissing was considered part of the sexual desire of a single person in love,” the researchers wrote.
The study differentiates between “friendly-parental kisses” and “romantic-sexual kisses”.
While the former seems ubiquitous across time and place, the latter “(is) not culturally universal.”