<\/p>\n
A new study, published this week in the journal Science, concluded that this practice was probably widespread even in ancient times.<\/p>\n
He also presented evidence that “kissing on the lips has been documented in ancient Mesopotamia and Egypt” from at least 2,500 BC.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
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.”<\/p>\n
“I knew there was older material from ancient Mesopotamia,” Arboll, who studies cuneiform writing on ancient clay tablets, told AFP.<\/p>\n
Although this evidence was collected in the 1980s, “it appears that the information was never adopted in other fields,” he added.<\/p>\n
The researchers found relatively few references to romantic kissing in the thousands of ancient cuneiform texts available.<\/p>\n
However, “there are clear examples illustrating that kissing was considered a common part of romantic intimacy in ancient times.”<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
The study differentiates between “friendly-parental kisses” and “romantic-sexual kisses”.<\/p>\n
While the former seems ubiquitous across time and place, the latter “(is) not culturally universal.”<\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n