A Curious History of Sex
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SEX
AND
MONEY
The Oldest Profession
Sex Work in the Ancient World
Despite the old adage, sex work is not the world’s oldest profession: medicine is. In 1952, anthropologist George Peter Murdock of Yale University published his research on the social customs of hundreds of indigenous people around the world, and while he found no evidence of prostitution, the figure of the medicine man was universal.
I have personally read accounts of many hundreds of primitive societies, and in not a single one of them is genuine prostitution reported. Many of them exhibit forms of sex behavior that we would regard as exceedingly lax, but such laxity does not take the specific form of prostitution except in the so-called ‘higher’ civilizations. The oldest profession is actually the one to which you yourselves belong.1
Other scholars such as Mary Breckinridge have suggested that midwifery is the oldest profession: ‘The midwife’s calling is so ancient that the medical and nursing professions, in even their earliest traditions, are parvenus beside it.’2 Trying to work out what is the ‘oldest’ profession is actually something of a wild goose chase as professions, and indeed money, are quite recent inventions. Homo sapiens has been wandering around the planet for about 200,000 years, and the earliest evidence of coined money dates to 640 BC in Lydia, Asia Minor. Even systems of bartering goods, rather than money, depend largely on the domestication of cattle and cultivation of crops, and that dates to around 9000 BC.3 This means that for most of human history, we have done without money. Given that money is arguably the most dominating influence in how we live our lives today, it is sobering to remember that the only value money really has is that which we collectively attach to it. Ultimately, it’s pieces of paper and discs of metal which somewhere along the line we have all agreed are special. We managed perfectly well without it until our ancestors thought that those gold rocks were nicer to look at than the other rocks.
Without money and commerce there are no professions. There is no evidence of selling sex among the Maori before Europeans arrived in New Zealand carrying with them syphilis and flags. Victorian explorers were surprised to discover that the Dyak people of Borneo had ‘no word to express that vice’.4 When the Christian missionary Lorrin Andrews translated the Bible into Hawaiian in 1865, he had to invent new words to teach the islanders about the concepts of sexual shame and infidelity.5
Image of a large native missionary family, taken by A. A. Montano for his New Photographic Gallery in Honolulu, c.1878.
There is very little evidence of a sex trade among the Native Americans until the Europeans turned up to ‘civilise’ everyone. Even then, the only evidence that exists is that the invaders believed all indigenous women were promiscuous.6 The commodification of sex, and the selling of sexual favours as a profession, is firmly linked to the establishment of money and economic markets. The causal effect of establishing commerce with the selling of sex was seen in a pioneering experiment by economist Keith Chen. In 2006, Chen introduced the use of currency to a group of capuchin monkeys, and taught them to buy grapes, jelly and apples with tokens. The female monkeys began trading sex for tokens almost immediately.*
It was Rudyard Kipling who first coined the phrase ‘the world’s oldest profession’ in the short story ‘On the City Wall’ (1898). The tale opens with the immortal line: ‘Lalun is a member of the most ancient profession in the world.’7 The expression has since fallen into common parlance as a historical truth. But what Kipling wrote after those words perhaps offers more insight into what is, at least, a very ancient profession indeed: ‘In the West, people say rude things about Lalun’s profession, and write lectures about it, and distribute the lectures to young persons in order that Morality may be preserved.’8 As Kipling observed, attitudes to selling sex are not fixed but are culturally determined. Researching ancient sexuality is difficult for many reasons, but particularly because historical records are always mediated through the author’s world view. What many historical texts understand as prostitution often speaks far more of the author’s own cultural prejudices than the practices being described.
For example, when the Spanish conquistadors colonised the Aztecs in 1521, they translated the Aztec Náhuatl word ahuienime as ‘prostitute’ or ‘whore’. But this translation was done by Spanish Catholics, and what they saw as ‘prostitution’ was not what the Aztecs saw at all. The word ahuienime is more accurately translated as ‘the bringer of joy’, and has religious, spiritual connotations. Unable to move beyond their own cultural attitudes, Spanish texts describe the ahuienimeltin as whores. As Ulises Chávez Jimenez argued, ‘the Spaniards did not understand the role of the ahuienimeltin in Aztec religion, where they legitimised cosmic models that allowed a deep communion with the Gods’.9
Some of the earliest written evidence of sex work comes from Ancient Mesopotamia. Verses written about the Babylonian goddess Inanna (also known as Ishtar), composed sometime between 2000 and 1000 BC, contain these lines:
When you stand against the wall your nakedness is sweet,
When you bend over, your hips are sweet …
When I stand against the wall it is one shekel,
When I bend over, it is one and a half shekels.10
Bear in mind it’s the goddess Inanna herself who is offering to bend over for one and a half shekels which goes some way to show that the sacred could be sexy as well as funny in the Ancient World.
The Code of Hammurabi, dating to 1754 BC, sets down the Babylonian code of law and covers a number of laws pertaining to the protection of the ‘ladies of the town’ (1680):
If a man’s wife does not bear him a child but a prostitute [kar.kid] from the street does bear him a child, he shall provide grain, oil, and clothing rations for the prostitute, and the child whom the prostitute bore to him shall be his heir; as long as his wife is alive, the prostitute will not reside in the house with his first-ranking wife.11
Legal protection and state regulation of sex work is found throughout the Ancient World. The Arthasastra of Kautilya is an Indian text on politics that was composed sometime between the second century BC and the third century AD. The Arthasastra devotes a chapter to discussing the duties of ganikadhyaksa, the ‘Superintendent of Courtesans’, and details rules for women in this profession. Sex work was regulated by the state and sex workers paid taxes each month. As with most professions, sex work was densely layered. For example, a ganika was appointed by the state to attend the king and received a salary of 1,000 panas every year, whereas bandhaki worked in brothels, and pumscali worked on the streets. The Arthasastra uses the word rupjiva to describe a woman selling sex, which translates to ‘one who makes a living out of her beauty’.12
One of the most contentious areas of study within the history of sex work is the practice of so-called ‘Sacred Prostitution’ in the Ancient World (also called Temple or Cult Prostitution).** It’s also an important area of study, as the belief that selling sex was once a sacred exchange directly challenges many of our modern narratives around sexual services. As Mary Beard has argued, the myth of sacred prostitution provides ‘a model for alternative humanities paraded by our archives, available for new living, for different lives’.13 The figure of the ‘sacred whore’ or ‘sexual priestess’ is a prominent figure in many spiritualist groups today who use sex as a healing ritual. Sacred prostitution is a notoriously difficult subject to research, let alone verify, and historians continue to debate if the practice existed at all. All that is left to try and decipher is a handful of ancient sources, and we have no way of knowing if they are factual or fictitious.
The ancient Babylonian epic Gilgamesh (c.1800 BC) tells the story of a temple ‘moll’ (1604) called Šamhat who serves Ishtar and tames the wild man Enkidu t
hrough her sexual skills.14 This is one of the earliest written references to sex work ever found, but it does not claim to be anything but a story. The earliest account of sacred sex work in a non-fiction text comes from the Greek historian Herodotus’s (c.484–425 BC) account of sixth-century neo-Babylonia:
The foulest Babylonian custom is that which compels every woman of the land to sit in the temple of Aphrodite and have intercourse with some stranger at least once in her life. Many women who are rich and proud and disdain to mingle with the rest, drive to the temple in covered carriages drawn by teams, and stand there with a great retinue of attendants. But most sit down in the sacred plot of Aphrodite, with crowns of cord on their heads; there is a great multitude of women coming and going; passages marked by line run every way through the crowd, by which the men pass and make their choice. Once a woman has taken her place there, she does not go away to her home before some stranger has cast money into her lap, and had intercourse with her outside the temple; but while he casts the money, he must say, ‘I invite you in the name of Mylitta’. It does not matter what sum the money is; the woman will never refuse, for that would be a sin, the money being by this act made sacred. So she follows the first man who casts it and rejects no one. After their intercourse, having discharged her sacred duty to the goddess, she goes away to her home; and thereafter there is no bribe however great that will get her. So then the women that are fair and tall are soon free to depart, but the uncomely have long to wait because they cannot fulfil the law; for some of them remain for three years, or four. There is a custom like this in some parts of Cyprus.15
Although he writes histories, Herodotus is what might be politely termed an ‘unreliable narrator’. He is a historian in much the same way that Disney is a historian. What’s more, he is clearly out to smear the reputation of the Babylonians and is projecting his own negative views around sexuality onto them – so, is any of this true? Possibly. There are other accounts of similar customs, but they could just be rehashings of Herodotus. Four hundred years after Herodotus, the historian Strabo (64 BC–AD 21) describes ritual sex practised at Acilisene in Armenia. Here, people honoured the Persian goddess Anaitis by dedicating their daughters to serve her in the temple before they were given in marriage.16
In De Dea Syria, the Greek writer Lucian of Samosata (AD 125–180) describes a ritual practised in Syria where women would have to have sex with a stranger in a public place as an offering of payment to the goddess Aphrodite.17 The Augustan historian Pompeius Trogus wrote: ‘There was a custom among Cyprians to send their virgins to the sea-shore before marriage on fixed days, for employment in order to get dowry-money, and to make a first-fruit offering to Aphrodite, a dedication to preserve their virtue in the future.’18 The Greek lyric poet Pindar (518–438 BC) also writes about sex workers being dedicated to Aphrodite’s temple in Corinth after the Olympic games: ‘O mistress of Cyprus, here to your grove Xenophon has led the hundred-limbed herd of grazing women.’19 But because Pindar himself called this work a skolion (drinking song), it’s unlikely this anecdote is anything more than a good yarn.20
Edwin Long, The Babylonian Marriage Market, 1875.
There are also several references in the Old Testament to qadeshes, a word many have translated to mean male and female temple prostitutes. Kings 23:7 reads ‘He also tore down the quarters of the male shrine prostitutes that were in the temple of the Lord, the quarters where women did weaving for Asherah.’21 But the devil is in the detail, and many historians dispute the translation.
James Tissot, The Harlot of Jericho and the Two Spies, 1896.
The most tangible evidence of sacred prostitution is the eight-hundred-year-old Hindu tradition of the devadasi in India. Devadasi means ‘female servant of God’, and refers to women who are dedicated to the goddess Yellamma. The earliest written records of dancing temple girls called devadasi dates to AD 1230–1240, from the time of Raja Raya III in Maharashtra.22 A thousand-year-old inscription in Tanjor Temple lists four hundred devadasis in Tanjor, four hundred and fifty in Brahideswara temple and another five hundred in the Sorti Somnath temple.23 Devadasi looked after the temples, and sang and danced in devotion to the deities. They were also courtesans, supported by wealthy patrons who sought out the devadasi because they were sacred women. They dazzled the courts with their poetry, music and devotion to the goddess. Classical Indian dances such as Bharatnatyam, Odissi and Kathak are all legacies of the devadasi. Sex was a part of their world, but it was incidental: they celebrated art, beauty, love and the divine. When the British colonised India, they brought with them their rigid world view and were unable to see the devadasi as anything but prostitutes. So repulsed were they by what they saw, the British set about shaming and dismantling the devadasi institution.
A photograph of two dancing girls, by K. L. Brajbasi & Co., Patna, c.1910.
In 1892, the Hindu Social Reform Association petitioned the Governor General of India and the Governor of Madras to erase the devadasi: ‘There exists in the Indian community a class of women commonly known as nautch-girls. And that these women are invariably prostitutes.’24 The British missionaries taught India what a ‘prostitute’ was and why it was so shameful. Support for the devadasi disappeared; they were socially shunned and stigmatised. Cut off from patrons and the temple, they tried to earn money by dancing at private events and selling sexual services. Eventually, the devadasi were outlawed throughout India in 1988. The tradition continues in southern India, but the women are no longer respected. Now they are stigmatised and without protection many abuses occur, but impoverished parents still dedicate young daughters to the service of the goddess.
Selling sex is not the oldest profession in the world, but sex just might be the oldest currency. We’ve always had sex, always enjoyed sex, and therefore always traded sex. Attitudes to the sex trade are not fixed but are constantly in flux. Sex workers in the Ancient World were often sanctioned by the state, protected by the law, and, if not always respected, then at least accepted as part of day-to-day life. There is also evidence that those who sold sex were once revered as noble and holy. Selling sex is heavily criminalised around the world today and is a far cry from being regarded as socially acceptable, let alone sacred. This change in fortune speaks of dramatic shifts in cultural attitudes towards sex. In cultures where sex was not regarded as inherently sinful, attitudes to sex workers were markedly different from cultures that repressed sexuality. As patriarchal, puritanical attitudes to sex developed in the West, women’s sexuality came in for particular censure, and the women selling sex were condemned most of all. Rather than condemning the sex trade wholesale as immoral and dangerous, perhaps we should ask what the world would be like if those selling sex were again respected, instead of marginalised; if they were given rights, instead of rescue. I doubt sex workers will ever again be regarded as priestesses, but at the very least they should be respected as professionals – from one of the oldest professions in the world.
* * *
* Keith Chen, Venkat Lakshminarayanan and Laurie R. Santos, ‘How Basic are Behavioral Biases? Evidence from Capuchin Monkey Trading Behavior’, Journal of Political Economy, 114.3 (2006), pp. 517–37
g dance. Once they have had sex, she takes the rocks and returns to her mate, who is none the wiser. ‘Pick up a Penguin’, BBC News, 1998
** The historian leading the charge against the existence of sacred sex work is Stephanie Lynn Budin, in The Myth of Sacred Prostitution in Antiquity (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010). Budin tears into various translations of Herodotus to show that although the sex trade thrived in the Ancient World, it was not considered sacred.
1 George P. Murdock, ‘Anthropology and its Contribution to Public Health’, American Journal of Public Health and the Nations Health, 42.1 (1952), 7–11
2 Mary Breckinridge, ‘The Nurse-Midwife – A Pioneer’, American Journal of Public Health, 17.11 (1927), 1147–51, p. 1147
3 Glyn Davies, A History of Money (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2002); Graeme Barker, The Agricultural Revolution in Prehistory (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009).
4 William W. Sanger, The History of Prostitution (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1858), p. 414.
5 Sally Engle Merry, Colonizing Hawaii: The Cultural Power of Law (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000), p. 249.
6 Gordon Morris Bakken and Brenda Farrington, Encyclopedia of Women in the American West (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 2003), p. 236.
7 Rudyard Kipling, ‘On the City Wall’, in Soldiers Three, and Other Stories (London: Routledge, 1914), p. 137.
8 Ibid.
9 Ulises Chávez Jimenez, ‘How Much for Your Love: Prostitution Among the Aztecs’, Academia.Edu, 2004