K is for Kiss

You must remember this,
A kiss is just a kiss
A sigh is just a sigh…

From “As Time Goes By”

When and how humans began to kiss is a lively debate–very lively! The Internet has different answers, many contradictory. Just this morning, I have read no less than five articles that claim to cover the history of kissing, and they all cite different ancient history. The oldest kiss is from Brazil–no Akkadia! Definitely tablets on Easter Island (what? Reddit?) Positively from Vedic love poems, Sappho, Sumeria…

And, of course, the research has been fun!

I will not claim to have the definitive answer, nor do I simply want to repeat what other journalists have done. To place this in an A to Z context, let me go at it from the same angle as the other posts.

1. How shall we define and explain the purpose of kissing in ancient history?
2. Where and when (around the world) are the oldest examples?
3. What do these examples tell us about humanity?

The Function of an Embrace

As with jewelry yesterday, the idea of kissing seems to be deeply human, a practice that may have “advanced” from a simple habit of primates. Even so, many cultures today do not kiss, perhaps knowing that casual kissing does spread disease. Instead, some cultures advocate for touching foreheads or noses, sharing breath, or smelling each other. Personally, I’d rather have the kissing and access to the medical system, although I wouldn’t go as far as the Scientific American writer who said such cultures have “not mastered the art of osculation.” Maybe, they’ve mastered it, just not in public.

The classical writers from India, the French poets, and modern anthropologists have identified several types of kissing, from the kiss of peace (religious) to the kiss of affection (parental) to the kiss of romance. The Romans were quite specific: osculum for kissing the hand or cheek, between acquaintances; basium for a friendly peck on the lips, with friends or family; suavium for the one that liquifies your insides. Most of the examples we can surface from the archaeological records is of the latter, the kiss of passion and romantic affection.

Thus, while we know that our cousins, the chimpanzees, kiss on the lips in friendship, and that non-sexual kissing shows up in art, the most easily identifiable lip-locking is by those before, during, or after acts of passion.

Kissing is an idea both abstract and concrete. It involves lips, so we can look for such words or images in poetry, for example. Yet when we look at painting or sculpture, how much face do we have to see in order to be sure? As Georgia O’Keeffe’s drawing at the top suggests, it could be more the feeling than the activity. The physical act is about fitting tab A into slot B; but the sentiment behind it, whether that is love or desire, is harder to define. Even desire might be described with references to hormones and chemical compounds, but love is just not chemistry.

Yet we know when we see it, don’t we?

The Essence of Things

The modern sculptor Brancusi explained his famous modern art piece, The Kiss, by saying that “What is real is not the external form, but the essence of things.” The oldest known sculpture of two humans kissing–probably–is like the Brancusi, a 11,000-year-old carving from Ain Sakhri, a cave in Israel.

It’s definitely from Israel. It’s definitely dated +/- a few thousand years, which is very narrow in terms of these posts. It seems clearly like two humans, based on the legs. However, there are no lips or even faces. There’s barely an arm. Where’s Brancusi when the archaeologists need him? What there is, definitively, is two long, bendy, bipedal legs wrapped around each other, in a very recognizable manner. While some call this the “oldest known carving of intercourse,” others include it in the list of ancient kisses. How can you not?

The next rock painting is more controversial as “the oldest kiss.” Like the more established Ain Sakhri work, the figures are bipedal and their heads are together, but there are no faces or lips. Other paintings from this collection show such spindly legged. faceless people, walking, hunting, and perhaps dancing.

Further, this part of Brazil called Capivara park was long thought to be inhabited relatively late, by humans who came across the Bering Strait, then generally made their way south. This long-held view, known as the Clovis model, puts those rock painting humans there about 10-11,000 years ago. However, recent research has put forth strong evidence that the dates at this Serra de Capivara park could be more like 22,000 ya, if not older. Niede Guidon, a Brazilian archaeologist, believes that they could be 50,000-100,000 years old and made by humans who migrated from Africa, a claim which, if true, would cause establishment archaeological heads to explode.

Saving Dr. Guidon’s controversy for another day, let’s just agree that the Brazilian rock depiction is of humans kissing, somewhere between 11-22,000 years ago.

Those Steamy Akkadian Nights

While there might be a ten thousand year spread across the ancient examples of humans locking eyes and lips, by the time civilizations developed writing (@3500 BCE), they quickly advanced to poetry, fairly graphic at that. In one example billed as perhaps the oldest love poem ever written, an unnamed speaker tempts King Shu-Sin into the bedchamber. It’s thought that this was one of those metaphorical deals, where the king sleeps with a goddess, in this case Inanna, the Sumerian goddess of pretty much everything.

Bridegroom, let me caress you,
My precious caress is more savory than honey,
In the bedchamber, honey-filled,
Let me enjoy your goodly beauty…

Sumerian love poem, “The Love Song for Shu-Sin”

As an aside Shu-Sin, to whom the poem is dedicated, was the grandson of Shulgi, the guy who gave someone very pretty earrings (See J) and had maybe the world’s first icehouse (See I). Shulgi gets around, so perhaps he had plenty of practice with the goddesses, or at least their stand-ins, the priestesses of Inanna.

Lest this seem like an isolated example, the current “oldest” bit of writing that mentions kissing is another Sumerian text called the Barton Cylinder, which says:

With the true, great Queen of heaven, the older sister of Enlil,
Ninhursag … he has had intercourse;
he had kissed her;
the seed for a set of septupletes [seven children] he has poured into her womb.

From Sumerian text called the Barton cylinder, @2500 BCE.

In case it wasn’t clear, this was your basic Sky-Father-impregnating-Earth-Mother combo. It’s kind of hard to ignore how quickly things progress in this snippet from the first kiss of the world to the planting of seven children. Yet, one of the earliest clay sculptures from Sumeria also shows the bedchamber, complete with faces and other parts were touching.

Research into ancient Sumerian kissing done by a Danish husband and wife research team, Dr. Troels Arbøll and Dr. Sophie Rasmussen, noted that early Sumerian texts had numerous mentions of kissing, proving that Mesopotamians were well acquainted with the notion.
Arboll and Rasmussen also suggest that the texts acknowledge the existence of a herpes-like disease, spread by kissing. Previously, it was thought that humans only recently learned the link between kissing and the spread of disease; not so for the Mesopotamians, at least.

Aiming for Kama (Sutra)

Prior to this Danish analysis of Sumerian texts, the gold standard for commentary on ancient love came from Vedic texts from India @1800 BCE. Much of the substance of the Vedic texts was about the development of Hindu spirituality, but some describe weddings and love matches. Affairs especially between gods and humans were critical elements of the stories, with the spark of love between such entities even creating the “seed of the mind,” i.e. human intelligence.

The Rigveda, one of the Vedic texts, has a passage devoted to the bridal chamber and the lover’s embrace, while the ancient Indian epic Mahabarata recounts a young man telling his father that a woman met him “mouth to mouth.” That’s specific enough for me! Some centuries later, the (in)famous Indian Kama Sutra, a manual for loving and living, would come along, but built out of the early Indian romantic-erotic tradition..

The Comparative Refinement of the Greeks

While the Sumerians were jumping straight into the heavenly bedchamber and the Indian mystical-erotic texts were explaining the mechanics of good kissing, the Greeks may have achieved the most effective merge between the graphic and the ethereal. Several of the Greek “kylix” (drinking cups) including paintings where lovers stare soulfully into each others eyes. Usually these are men and women, though some were same sex couples. These paintings include people still with their clothes on. (Though I warn you not to simply start researching every kylix because some of them are Greek versions of the kama sutra positions. Is it hot in here?)

At least before we look at too many graphic paintings on a kylix, we can turn back to poetry which more gently brings on the beating heart. Greece was also the home of the sublime poet Sappho, from the 6th century BCE. Most of what we know about Sappho was from others who read her work, of which less than 10% has been found. But in its brevity, just a few lines paint a picture as clear as any of the sculptures, while still turning the function of the kiss into a gentle beckoning rather than entwined legs. Sure, the legs will probably get there eventually, but at least we can start with a kiss.

Sing the song while I, in the arms of Atthis,
Seal her lips to mine with a lover’s fervor,
Breathe her breath and drink her sighs to the honeyed
Lull of the melics [musical poetry].

Sappho, from “Anacreon’s Song”

So we do have the lovers embracing, like on the kissing couch with “fervor,” but we also have breathing and sighs. This seems to hearken back to our Brazilian couple from Capavera, fused into each other’s foreheads rather than by other body parts.

Only a few centuries later, not long n terms of anthropologist time, the Sufi poet Amara of Marv intermingled the essential notion of a poem itself with that of a kiss.

I will hide myself within my poem
So when you read it, I may kiss your lips.

Medieval poet, Amara of Marv @1050 CE.

Amara, according to the reference, was speaking to and about the Sufis, the whirling dervishes who would dance in a trance of religious fervor. In this context, Amara meant that the closeness to God could be achieved by touching ecstasy in other ways, through music and through human contact. Heaven could be approached with poetry, dancing, and thoughts of kissing. Perhaps this is what the figures painted near our kissing duo in Serra da Capivara were always trying to say.