Who kissed first? Archaeology has an answer
A commentary recently published in the journal Science pushed back the earliest documentation of kissing by 1,000 years and upended the hypothesis that people from a specific region were the first to kiss and tell.
A Babylonian clay tablet
NEW YORK: This is a love story: During the spring of 2008, long before they produced evidence of humanity’s first recorded kiss, Sophie Lund Rasmussen and Troels Pank Arboll clasped lips in their first good-night snog. They met a week earlier at a pub near the University of Copenhagen, where both were undergraduates. “I had asked my cousin if he knew any nice single guys with long hair and long beards,” Dr. Rasmussen said. “And he said, ‘I’ll intro you to one.’”
Dr. Arboll, in turn, had been looking for a partner that shared his interest in Assyriology, the study of Mesopotamian languages and the sources written in them. “Not many people know what an Assyriologist actually does,” he told her. “I do,” said Dr. Rasmussen, who had taken some of the same classes. Dr. Arboll, now a professor of Assyriology at the university, said, “When I heard that, I knew she was a keeper.” Three years later they wed. Dr. Rasmussen is now an ecologist at the University of Oxford’s Wildlife Conservation Research Unit and Aalborg University in Denmark.
One night over dinner in 2022, the couple discussed — as scientists in love do — a new genetic study that linked modern herpes variants to mouth-to-mouth kissing in the Bronze Age, roughly 3300 B.C. to 1200 B.C. In the paper’s supplementary materials, a brief history of kissing pinpointed South Asia as the place of origin and traced the first literary buss to 1500 B.C., when Vedic Sanskrit manuscripts were being transcribed from oral history.
The researcher, at the University of Cambridge, suggested that the custom — a lip-kissing precursor that involved rubbing and pressing noses together — developed into hardcore smooching. She noted that by 300 B.C. — about when the Indian how-to sex manual, the Kama Sutra, was published — kissing had spread to the Mediterranean with the return of Alexander the Great’s troops from Northern India. But the couple believed that wasn’t its start.
“I told Sophie that I knew of even older accounts written in both the Sumerian and Akkadian languages,” said Dr. Arboll, whose expertise is ancient accounts of medical diagnoses, prescriptions and healing rituals. “So after dinner, we double-checked,” said Dr. Rasmussen, who specializes in hedgehogs.
They consulted cuneiform texts on clay tablets from Mesopotamia (modern-day Iraq and Syria) and Egypt for clear examples of intimate kissing. Their investigation resulted in a commentary recently published in the journal Science that pushed back the earliest documentation of kissing by 1,000 years and upended the hypothesis that people from a specific region were the first to kiss and tell.
The Danish husband-and-wife team maintain that since at least the late third millennium B.C., kissing was a widespread and well-established part of romance in the Middle East. “Kissing was not a custom that emerged abruptly in a single point of origin,” Dr. Arboll said. “Instead, it seems to have been common across a range of cultures.” Dr. Arboll and Dr. Rasmussen proposed that the earliest account of kissing was etched into the Barton Cylinder, a clay tablet that dates to around 2400 B.C. The object was unearthed in the ancient Sumerian city of Nippur in 1899, and named after George Barton, the professor of Semitic languages at Bryn Mawr College, who translated it 19 years later.
