Kissing was already a well-established practice 4,500 years ago in the Middle East. This practice, whose origin must be traced back more than 5,000 years, was so common in Mesopotamia, the great civilization that emerged between the Tigres and Euphrates rivers (in what would be Iraq and Syria today), that they left it recorded in their famous clay tablets.
For thousands of years, Mesopotamian texts in cuneiform writing recorded everything from religious passages to economic transactions, including beliefs about the devil or historical legends. Thousands of these tablets have survived to this day, providing valuable information about this culture.
Recent research pointed out that the earliest evidence of kissing on the lips arose in a very specific geographic location in South Asia 3,500 years ago, from where it may have spread to other regions, simultaneously accelerating the spread of the herpes virus.
But, as Dr. Troels Pank Arbøll and Dr. Sophie Lund Rasmussen explain in an article published in the journal Science, there are a variety of written sources from early Mesopotamian societies that indicate kissing was common in the Middle East 1,000 years earlier.
“There are clay tablets that contain clear examples that kissing was considered part of romantic intimacy in ancient times, just as kissing could be part of friendships and family relationships,” says Pank Arbøll, an expert on the history of Mesopotamian medicine from the University of Copenhagen.
"Therefore, kissing should not be considered as a custom that originated exclusively in a single region and spread from there, but rather appears to have been practiced in multiple ancient cultures over several millennia."
Lund Rasmussen, from the University of Oxford, recalls that there is research on bonobos and chimpanzees, the closest living relatives to humans, which have shown that both species "kiss, which may suggest that the practice is fundamental behavior." in humans, which explains why it can be found in all cultures."
Both specialists highlight that this practice, in addition to its importance in social and sexual behavior, may have played an "unintentional role in the transmission of microorganisms", which could cause the spread of certain viruses between humans.
However, they consider the suggestion that kissing can be seen as a sudden biological trigger behind the spread of pathogens "more dubious." The spread of the herpes simplex virus, which researchers have indicated may have accelerated with the introduction of kissing, would be a case in point.
“There is a substantial body of medical texts from Mesopotamia, some of which mention a disease with symptoms reminiscent of herpes simplex virus 1,” says Arbøll. These writings were influenced by a variety of cultural and religious concepts, and therefore it must be emphasized that they cannot be read at face value.
“Still, it is interesting to note some similarities between the disease known as buʾshanu in ancient Mesopotamian medical texts and the symptoms caused by herpes simplex infections. The bu'shanu disease was located mainly in or around the mouth and throat, and symptoms included vesicles, which is one of the dominant signs of herpes infection."
"If the practice of kissing was so widespread and well established in a variety of ancient societies, the effects of kissing in terms of pathogen transmission probably must have been more or less constant," concludes Dr. Rasmussen.
