Ancient Persians kissed on the mouth or the cheek according to rank
Herodotus reported that when two Persians met, they skipped words entirely. Equals kissed each other on the mouth; if one was slightly lower in status, the kiss went on the cheek. Long before it meant romance, a kiss could be a precise social signal.
Whether kissing is instinct or learned habit remains disputed. Bonobos kiss after fights, perhaps to make peace, which suggests an instinct. Yet only about 90 percent of humanity is thought to kiss, and in some places, including parts of Indigenous Australia, Tahiti and many African societies, lip kissing arrived with European settlers. Some anthropologists think it grew out of suckling or mothers pre-chewing food for infants.
Vaughn Bryant, a Texas A&M anthropologist who studied the history of the kiss, traced the earliest reference to kissing-like behaviour to the Vedas, about 3,500 years ago. He argued that the practice spread west after Alexander the Great reached the Punjab in 326 BCE. Newer research disputes any single origin, pointing to Mesopotamian and Egyptian evidence from as early as 2500 BCE. Sumerian poems mention kissing with the tongue, while Mesopotamian society frowned on public displays of its erotic side. Egyptian love poems from the New Kingdom, found at Deir el-Medina, speak of lips that make wine unnecessary.
The Romans kept three words for three kisses. An osculum went on the hand or cheek, a basium was a closed-mouth kiss on the lips between relatives, and a suavium was the kiss of passion. In medieval Europe, nobles sealed legal and diplomatic agreements with a kiss, and a lip-to-lip kiss was believed to mingle two souls, since breath was thought to carry part of the soul. The Danish scholar Kristoffer Nyrop found folk tales in many countries in which a kiss breaks enchantment, as in Old French Arthurian romances where a princess turned dragon regains her human form only when a knight dares to kiss her.
The scholarly study of kissing, called philematology, dates to the nineteenth century and drew in Charles Darwin, among others. The English word descends from Old English cyssan, to kiss. Nyrop noted that French culture distinguishes some twenty kinds of kiss and German about thirty.
Source: Kiss
