A Kiss From 4,500 Years Ago Reveals Something Remarkably Familiar About Ancient Humans

The world’s oldest recorded kiss is more than 4,500 years old. It was written into stone, in a story about two gods having sex.

The account comes from ancient Mesopotamia, where scribes pressed stories into clay tablets using a script called cuneiform. Thousands of years later, those tablets preserve what may be humanity’s earliest surviving written description of a romantic or sexual kiss.

But this ancient kiss is just the beginning of the story. Other Mesopotamian texts describe passionate lovers, trembling lips, and even a woman who explicitly forbade her former partner from kissing her.

Welcome to the world of humanity’s ancient kisses.

The oldest kiss ever written down

Kissing is such a familiar part of human life that we rarely stop to think about how strange it actually is. We press our lips against another person’s, sometimes exchange saliva, and somehow turn this simple gesture into an expression of love, desire, affection, or intimacy. It’s a staple of romance, from first dates to wedding ceremonies. But when did humans start doing it?

No one knows for sure. Kissing probably existed long before people learned to write, leaving no trace for archaeologists to uncover. But if we want to find the oldest kiss ever recorded, we have to travel back more than 4,500 years, to ancient Mesopotamia, where someone pressed a surprisingly intimate encounter into a clay tablet.

And fittingly, the earliest surviving written kiss wasn’t between two ordinary lovers. It was between gods.

One of the earliest known descriptions of kissing comes from an ancient Sumerian myth about a grain goddess named Ezinan and the god An. The story survives in manuscripts dated to approximately 2600–2500 BCE, making them around 4,500 to 4,600 years old.

In the myth, the gods have sex, kiss, and subsequently become parents. It’s a brief but clear reference.

Assyriologist Troels Pank Arbøll, of the University of Copenhagen, examined this and other ancient accounts in a 2025 study published in Evolution and Human Behavior. The Ezinan myth, identified in a 2024 scholarly publication, appears to provide an even earlier written reference to romantic-sexual kissing than previously recognized.

Another early example is the Barton Cylinder, a Sumerian clay artifact dating to roughly 2500–2350 BCE. Its inscription also describes a sexual encounter between deities followed by a kiss.

But these are all mythological accounts, not mentions of regular people. That doesn’t mean there aren’t any mentions of regular folk kissing.

A love letter from nearly 4000 years ago

Nearly 4,000 years ago, someone in the Mesopotamian city of Sippar expressed an intense desire to kiss a lover.

A surviving passage from Akkadian literature captures the anticipation:

“My upper lip becomes moist, while my lower lip trembles! I shall embrace him, I shall kiss him.”

This sounds so familiar it could have been written mere decades ago. It’s strikingly familiar, despite having been recorded nearly four millennia ago.

The passage was translated and discussed by scholar Nathan Wasserman in his 2016 book Akkadian Love Literature of the Third and Second Millennium BCE, which examines more than 30 ancient compositions concerning love and sexuality.

We don’t know whether the passage describes an actual relationship or a fictional scene. But it shows that Mesopotamian writers viewed kissing largely the same way we view it today.

The evidence wasn’t confined to literature, either.

A Babylonian clay model from around 1800 BCE depicts a nude couple kissing during a sexual encounter. It’s a remarkably direct visual expression of intimacy, preserved for roughly 3,800 years.

Together, these artifacts suggest that romantic kissing was neither an obscure gesture nor a one-off literary invention. It had a recognizable place in Mesopotamian life.

Ancient people even wrote about refusing a kiss

Perhaps the most relatable ancient reference to kissing comes from a relationship that was apparently falling apart.

A legal document from Larsa, dating to around 1800 BCE, records a woman named Shat-Marduk declaring that a man would no longer return to her intimately.

“He will not return to me, he will not propose having sexual relations, and he will not kiss my lips.”

The document also reveals something that romantic poetry alone cannot: kisses carried social meaning. They could express desire and affection, but they could also form part of the boundaries governing intimate relationships.

Again, strikingly similar to today.

The first kiss was probably much older

For years, researchers often pointed to a roughly 3,500-year-old South Asian text, tentatively dated to 1500 BCE, as the earliest written evidence of romantic kissing.

But in a 2023 research article, Arbøll and biologist Sophie Lund Rasmussen showed that Mesopotamian records pushed the documented history back by roughly 1,000 years. The later research identified even earlier surviving passages.

“Therefore, kissing should not be regarded as a custom that originated exclusively in any single region and spread from there, but rather appears to have been practiced in multiple ancient cultures over several millennia,” Arbøll said.

Still, the oldest written kiss is not necessarily the first kiss. Not even close.

Writing emerged in Mesopotamia around 5,200 years ago (3200 BCE), initially serving mainly administrative purposes. Stories about gods, romantic relationships, and private lives entered the written record later.

People could have been kissing for thousands, or even tens of thousands, of years before anyone described it on clay.

And one extraordinary prehistoric object hints at just how much older intimate behavior might be.

Could this 11,000-year-old sculpture show an even older kiss?

Long before the Sumerians developed writing, someone in the region near modern Bethlehem carved a small piece of calcite into the shape of two embracing people.

Known as the Ain Sakhri Lovers, the roughly 11,000-year-old sculpture shows two figures with their arms and legs wrapped around one another. Their heads touch, and the British Museum describes their lips as touching, too.

It is considered one of the oldest known representations of a couple making love.

Could this be the oldest surviving depiction of a kiss? Possibly. But the sculpture is highly stylized, and without facial details, we cannot confidently distinguish a kiss from other forms of close physical contact.

Nor can we determine exactly what its maker intended. It might celebrate intimacy, symbolize fertility, depict a mythological scene, or represent something else entirely.

Even with those uncertainties, it offers a tantalizing glimpse into prehistoric attitudes toward closeness and sexuality.

Could kissing be older than humans?

There’s an even more striking possibility: kissing might be older than our species.

Chimpanzees and bonobos, our closest living relatives, sometimes engage in mouth-to-mouth contact resembling kissing. Their behavior doesn’t necessarily carry the same romantic meaning as a human kiss, but it suggests that some of the underlying social behaviors may have deep evolutionary roots, going back to our common ancestor with them.

“In fact, research into bonobos and chimpanzees, the closest living relatives to humans, has shown that both species engage in kissing, which may suggest that the practice of kissing is a fundamental behaviour in humans, explaining why it can be found across cultures,” Rasmussen said.

Scientists have proposed several possible explanations for the evolution of kissing, including social bonding, mate assessment, food sharing, and behaviors inherited from ancestral primates. None has conclusively explained the origin of romantic kissing.

There’s also an intriguing complication. Despite its prominence in movies, literature, and popular culture, romantic kissing isn’t universal.

A 2015 anthropological study examining 168 cultures found evidence of romantic-sexual kissing in only 46% of them.

The findings suggest that biology alone cannot explain the enormous variety of human romantic behavior. Cultural traditions matter, too.

Kissing has also been spreading germs for thousands of years

Kissing may be an expression of affection, but it is also an efficient way to exchange saliva and the microorganisms it contains.

This has prompted researchers to investigate whether romantic kissing influenced the historical spread of infections, including herpes simplex virus 1 (HSV-1), the virus commonly associated with cold sores.

For instance, a 2022 genetic study proposed that the spread of romantic kissing during Bronze Age migrations may have accelerated the transmission of certain lineages of herpes simplex virus 1 (HSV-1), which commonly causes cold sores.

Yet Arbøll and Rasmussen argue that the ancient evidence complicates the idea of kissing suddenly emerging and triggering a major wave of infection. If kissing was already practiced in multiple ancient societies, its potential role in transmitting pathogens was probably longstanding.

Ancient Mesopotamian medical texts offer another clue. They describe a condition called buʾshanu, which affected the mouth and throat and could cause small blisters around the lips, resembling oral herpes.

The resemblance is intriguing, but without biological evidence, there’s no way to establish that the ancient condition was actually HSV-1.

So, when was the first kiss?

The earliest currently identified written descriptions of romantic-sexual kissing date to around 2600–2500 BCE, in ancient Mesopotamia. But those accounts do not reveal who first kissed, where it happened, or even which civilization first practiced it.

The behavior may have existed thousands of years before the earliest surviving records. Its evolutionary origins could be older still.

We don’t know when the first kiss happened; we don’t even know if the first kiss was between two humans or another species.

But here’s the cool part about it.

Civilizations disappeared, languages were forgotten, and cities crumbled. But some kisses, pure moments of intimacy, made it into the archaeological record. Preserved for ever, for future generations to discover and wonder about.