On Sacred Sex in the Ancient Near East

I think all writers have gremlins—the little voices that make them obsess over one thing or another, often to the detriment of telling a tight and focused story. This post is about one of mine.

I’m drawing quite a bit on Mesopotamian mythology in building the supernatural world of A Season of Shades. One of the reasons for that is how relatively uninhibited their culture seemed to be about sex. Šamkat from the Epic of Gilgameš (yes, I am having fun with that “š”) uses sex to civilize the wild man Enkidu and take him back to Uruk to be a companion and counterweight to Gilgameš. Inanna/Ištar is their most venerated deity, and the one featured in the most stories. She’s the main goddess of sex, but not a mother goddess. She’s aggressive and untamed. There’s a whole category of ancient songs of Inanna rejoicing in her vulva. And there’s a complicated, controversial connection between her temples, ritual sex, and prostitution.

This post won’t be the final word on that controversy. But it will have my position on what I think is likely to be true and what we just can’t answer, in case I’m ever in a position of needing to respond to vengeful critics from one side of that controversy or the other, as my brain so anxiously imagines.

There are a few questions with particularly disputed answers:

  • Do the words kar.kid (Sumerian), harimtu (Akkadian), or qedesha (Hebrew) mean “prostitute”?

  • Was sacred prostitution a part of temple practices in ancient Mesopotamian or Canaanite culture?

  • Was there really a “sacred marriage” sexual ritual between Mesopotamian kings and the high priestesses of Ištar’s temples?

The Traditional View

The traditional view answers “yes” to all those questions. The harimtu Šamkat, from the Epic of Gilgameš, is often translated as “harlot” (though sometimes also as courtesan or hetaera). The story of Tamar and Judah in Genesis alternates between calling her a qedeša (woman set apart) and zona (harlot). Deuteronomy forbids any Israelite from being a qedeša (female) or qedeš (male). Hosea condemns those who visit zona and qedešot, in the same sentence. When Josiah cleanses the temple, he breaks down the houses of the (male) qedešim.

Moving beyond the terms for prostitution and to descriptions of the actual practice, and from biblical Canaan to ancient Babylon, the most famous account of sacred prostitution comes from the Greek historian Herodotus in the 5th century BC:

The foulest Babylonian custom is that which compels every woman of the land once in her life to sit in the temple of Aphrodite and have intercourse with some stranger. Many women who are rich and proud and disdain to consort with the rest, drive to the temple in covered carriages drawn by teams, and there stand 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 stranger men pass and make their choice. When a woman has once taken her place there she goes not 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 demand you in the name of Mylitta” (that is the Assyrian name for Aphrodite). It matters not what be the sum of the money; the woman will never refuse, for that were a sin, the money being by this act sacred. So she follows the first man who casts it and rejects none. After their intercourse she has made herself holy in the goddess’s sight and goes away to her home; and thereafter there is no bribe however great that will get her. So then the woman 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 to this in some parts of Cyprus.

Other ancient writers gave similar but shorter accounts, some obviously influenced by Herodotus and some apparently independent.

Thousands of years later (from 1890 into the early 1900s), James George Frazer published his massive study of comparative mythology The Golden Bough, with an exhaustive listing of “sacred marriage” rituals, emphasizing their common themes, particularly the purpose of ensuring the fertility of the land.

So coming up to the 1950s and 1960s, it was common scholarly belief that all that stuff was true. Every temple to Inanna, Ishtar, Asherah, or Aphrodite was read as a likely brothel, and every priestess a likely prostitute. Even words for priestess with roots like “holy woman” would get translated as prostitute.

Current Divergent Views

Oh boy. This is where it gets long. I’m used to most research topics being decently Google-able or ChatGPT-able, but in this case I think those tools do a pretty poor job representing the mainstream scholarly position, such as there is one. I chalk this up to the best scholarly sources being difficult for crawlers to access, while more polemical papers that get posted to Academia.edu end up having a disproportionate impact on search engines and AI. Wikipedia still seems to have decent overviews of these topics, but it took a while to resolve the conflict I saw between all those tools.

Current views have more or less of a split depending on which of the three questions we’re dealing with. There’s more controversy over the existence of sacred prostitution than there is over the Mesopotamian “sacred marriage” rites.

On Sacred Prostitution

There are a few critical scholars with very sharp critiques of the traditional views on sacred prostitution. Some examples:

There are earlier ones than that, I think starting with a guy named Arnaud (in the 70s?), but I think he wrote in French and I wasn’t able to track down his contribution to the debate.

Those are the sources you’ll probably see first if you Google for research on “sacred prostitution”.

Yet, the summary you’ll get on sacred prostitution from Wikipedia definitely doesn’t treat it as a settled question the way Budin and Assante would. The first few paragraphs seem like a decent summary. When it gets into the detailed section lower down, it seems more uneven.

Other impartial sources were harder to find. A Cambridge University book titled Women’s Writing of Ancient Mesopotamia says that it’s still the general consensus of Assyriologists that harimtu means prostitute. It notes Assante’s disagreement and describes her alternate definition, but neither endorses or denies it.

One of the most approachable and balanced takes on the debate that I found was the paper Priestesses and “Sacred Prostitutes” in the Ancient Eastern Mediterranean by Yale professor Johannah Stuckey. She suggests that the Bible’s equivalence of qedešah and zona was done by writers of the Bible who came later than the stories they’re recounting, as an attempt to discredit the whole idea of priestesses (who may have been the writers’ rivals for power).

There seems to be a strong consensus that Herodotus was wrong, and that a lot of writers and translators since him have gone way too far in finding sacred prostitution in places that it wasn’t happening, and translating various terms for “priestess” into some variant of “prostitute” in ways that weren’t justified. Of the sources I’ve looked at, Phyllis Bird’s book Harlot or Holy Woman? A Study of Hebrew Qedešah looks like one of the best deep dives on that (though it’s specific to the Bible).

At the same time, there are still numerous associations between sex and some priestess roles or temple functions. This is where I see the biggest split. Mainstream Assyriologists note these associations that are found in the cuneiform sources and offer a range of possible meanings, while only briefly noting the work of the critical scholars that make much more sweeping claims. The Cambridge book above is one example. Yoram Cohen’s paper The Wages of a Prostitute (which is really making a separate argument about transating the word nidna to mean “wages” instead of “gift”) is another example.

The best summary of mainstream scholarly thought in this area might be the entry on Prostitution from the Reallexikon der Assyriologie und Vorderasiatischen Archäologie (Encyclopaedia of Ancient Near Eastern Studies) by Jerold Cooper. He provides an absolute mountain of citations showing the prevalence of prostitution in the ancient near east, and support for kar.kid and harimtu meaning prostitute. It is difficult to take Assante’s and Budin’s conclusions seriously after reading it. On sacred prostitution specifically, he notes that it is very controversial where prostitution took place in ancient Mesopotamia. It was not necessarily the temple. There are some records of prostitution payments being owed to the temple, though.

I get the sense that there’s more going on than just scholarly disagreement here. Budin in particular has a penchant for publicly chastising scholars who haven’t gotten on board with her or Assante’s claims (see her review on Phyllis Bird’s book). This has made the topic of sacred prostitution something of a third rail, as I saw in this /r/Assyriology Reddit thread where someone had asked whether Šamkat was a priestess.

šamhat is, as you have pointed out, a ḫarimtu. if you ask three assyriologists what this word means, you’ll get four answers. i translated it in a class last year as “i’m not touching that word with a ten-foot pole”.

On Mesopotamian Sacred Marriage

While there is still uncertainty as to whether the sacred marriage rite was physically consummated, there does not seem to be the same level of tension around this question that there is about sacred prostitution.

There are some sources, like the Britannica entry on hieros gamos, that say it was definitely physically consummated, and done yearly to ensure a good harvest.

There are a lot of ancient sources on it, with vivid descriptions of all the pomp and circumstance involved, hymns to be sung, and explicit accounts of how thoroughly the king pleasured the goddess. In The Sumerian World in 2013, Kathleen McCaffrey offered a good summary of what’s currently known:

Investigations of the Sacred Marriage have centered on several questions raised by this corpus. Was the Sacred Marriage a literary topos or a performed rite? The occasional scholar has been inclined to dismiss the Sacred Marriage as fiction, either because literal ritual intercourse seems implausible or because the evidence is literary (Kraus 1974: 249; Pongratz-Leisten 2008: 49). However, most would agree that the impression provided by different genres is not easily set aside. The inscriptional evidence is considerable, if lacking in specifics, and the Inanna-Dumuzi corpus is annotated with liturgical annotations that are out of place in songs of popular character. The specialized notation situates the Inanna-Dumuzi songs in the performative milieu of temple musicians, prompting several translators to identify these songs as actual liturgies sung on the occasion of the Sacred Marriage (Kramer 1963: 489; Sefati 1998: 25–26). More attention has focused on how a ritual marriage between ruler and goddess might have been staged. The most baffling aspect is that texts describe the goddess herself as being present, leading most reviewers to conclude that the ritual must have required a human stand-in. The conundrum as to the identity of Inanna’s representative has generated much commentary (see summaries by Cooper 1993; Sefati 1998: 19–21; Lapinkivi 2004; Pongratz-Leisten 2008). Various priestesses have been suggested, most often the office of the high priestess. Although the role should have conferred great honor, no woman is ever mentioned as impersonating the goddess, and actual intercourse would have presented difficulties. The high priestess was often the king’s own daughter. Further complicating matters, some monarchs (for example Šulgi) came to the throne as children; others are likely to have been biologically female (McCaffrey 2008). In view of such considerations, some have postulated a symbolic ceremony (Steinkeller 1999: 133–134; Lapinkivi 2008: 23–24).

McCaffrey goes on to describe one such symbolic ceremony, a “palm tree libation” that is depicted in a number of ancient Mesopotamian reliefs, as possibly depicting the actual events of the sacred marriage rite.

My Take

I started out with three questions:

  • Do the words kar.kid (Sumerian), harimtu (Akkadian), or qedesha (Hebrew) mean “prostitute”?

  • Was sacred prostitution a part of temple practices in ancient Mesopotamian or Canaanite culture?

  • Was there really a “sacred marriage” sexual ritual between Mesopotamian kings and the high priestesses of Ištar’s temples?

I think I can deal with the first and second one together, and give the idea of sacred sexual rituals its own treatment.

My Take on Sacred Prostitution and the Words Used For Ancient Prostitution Generally

Let’s set aside all the scholarly papers for a minute and just talk like people. Imagine you’re a temple priestess in the ancient near east. And in the particular time and place where you live, times are hard. There are too many mouths to feed and not enough food to go around. What do you do?

Ideally, you have options. Maybe you know how to weave, or maybe you find work harvesting in someone’s fields or tending their goats, or maybe you try creating and selling some kind of handicraft. Or maybe you don’t have options. Maybe the other jobs are already taken. Maybe you don’t have the resources to buy supplies to make things.

You might turn to prostitution, depending on a number of factors like what other options you have, how dire your situation is, how many men there are around with the ability to pay, and how distasteful the idea is to you. I might do the same. Plenty of women have done so, in every time period in history.

If you did, would you find clients at the temple? Maybe. Especially if a few of the other priestesses had the same idea and the area got a reputation as a place to buy sex. And if that happened, might you tell your potential clients that hiring you was not just a way to get their rocks off, but also would support the temple and bring your clients the favor of your temple’s goddess? It seems like smart marketing.

And that’s really all it takes for “sacred prostitution” to spring into existence. It doesn’t mean that it was actually dictated by a deity, or written in any official decree. It doesn’t matter if the money actually goes to you instead of the temple. It doesn’t matter if it happens everywhere, or just in a city or two for a limited period of time. Once word spreads and gets chewed up and regurgitated through the rumor mill, it would be enough to create the association between qedešah (holy woman) and zona (prostitute). It would be enough to provide the kernel of truth that gets embellished and magnified in Herodotus’ story, and featured in the accounts of the later classical writers, and then reinforced again thousands of years later in Fraser’s Golden Bough.

We can see an example of this happening in more recent history in India with the devadasis. They began in the 6th or 7th century CE as singers and dancers in Hindu temples. A few hundred years later, their role took on a high class sexual aspect as courtesans to kings. They could choose their own partners, unless one was specifically forbidden by their patron. When Muslim armies invaded in the 1200s, they lost that social status. And when British rule in the 1850s stripped them of their support systems entirely, they were reduced to indiscriminate prostitution.

The example of the devadasis shows how much roles and definitions can change over time. We should not be surprised if similar journeys are taken by terms like harimtu, qadištu, qedešah, or ištaritu. Until we invent a time machine, no one’s going to be able to prove that a story like my hypothetical, or like the devadasis, definitively never happened in ancient Mesopotamia. People making claims like that, unless they have that time machine, are doing something other than scholarship. Scholarship looks more like taking specific looks at specific texts from specific times and places and asking “what’s really going on here?”, and being open to wherever the evidence takes you, or recognizing that the evidence isn’t strong enough to make any definite conclusions.

As much as we would like all this scholarship to be completely dispassionate and unbiased, a lot of the interpretive work is still done by people’s general understandings of human nature, and by what they want to be true. This passage from Budin’s review of Bird’s book illustrates the problem well (though perhaps not in the way that Budin intended):

This reminds me of a meeting I had a few years ago with a noted Assyriologist to whom I was introduced as the one “who wrote that book on sacred prostitution.” He looked somewhat uncomfortable, told me that he had not yet read my book, but that he preferred to continue to accept the reality of sacred prostitution because “I like the idea of it.” A similar trajectory now seems to be happening in Near Eastern studies on the topic of prostitution generally. For over twenty years now the defnition of ḫarīmtu as meaning “prostitute” has been challenged, citing the absolute lack of evidence for the sale of sex in Mesopotamia. This has not stopped many scholars from insisting that there simply must have been prostitution in the Land between the Rivers; after all, it’s the oldest profession! Silver, in the appendix to his book, which contains a slight updating to his 2006 article on the existence and economic benefts of sacred prostitution in the Near East, refers to “‘prostitute/sex professional’—a group that must have been of some social significance in all periods of antiquity!” (p. 234, exclamation point in original). The idea that there was a time or place where men (specifically) could not have automatic access to female (specifically) sexuality for a few coins is, apparently, too horrible to consider. That the male right to female sex is not condoned by the gods is also, apparently, too horrible to consider. And so the belief in sacred prostitution endures.

The Assyriologist that Budin describes at the beginning of that passage is probably not the only one who “likes the idea” of sacred prostitution. And certainly that could contribute to it being exaggerated, terms mistranslated, etc. by people like Herodotus, Frazer, and any number of modern scholars. The exact extent to which that has happened is unclear, but I’m confident that it has happened.

On the other hand, that passage also reveals that Budin “likes the idea” of ancient Mesopotamia being a time and place where prostitution did not exist at all, which is miles away from the mainstream position. I suspect her attraction to that idea pushes her past the bounds of good scholarship, into more grand denials than are actually supported by the evidence, and even to oblique accusations that any scholars who disagree with her do so only for sexist reasons (see the closing sentences of her review of Bird’s book).

Assante’s claim that ancient Mesopotamia had no word for prostitute has been heard, noted, and generally not believed. Not because it is “too horrible to consider”, as Budin puts it, but because it just seems unlikely. It does seem to me that all societies have a mix of upstanding citizens who would never consider prostitution, along with some horny men and desperate (or maybe also horny) women who are willing to trade money and sex. Different societies fall on a continuum of how acceptable they find that practice, from “your brothers will put you to death” for it in some Muslim countries, to actual state permission for prostitution in others. But in all those places, they have a word for it. If you want to assert that prostitution never happened in ancient Mesopotamia, the burden is on you to say why the people of that time and place were so uniquely immune to the effects of sex drives and economic scarcity.

My biggest take-away from all this is actually one that I learned about a decade ago as I was re-examining claims from my own religion: beware of people making excessively confident and sweeping assertions about what definitely did or did not take place in the distant past. I think Fraser fell into that trap in asserting sacred prostitution’s widespread existence. I think Budin does too in saying that it absolutely never happened. I think Assante does it when she says ancient Mesopotamians didn’t even have a word for prostitute. I put a lot more trust in scholars like Phyllis Bird and Jerrold Cooper who are willing to admit inconsistency and ambiguity.

So to answer the questions from this section, yes, I think kar.kid and harimtu are commonly used to mean “prostitute” in stories like the Gilgameš epic. I find value in the examples that Assante has provided where those words have a broader meaning in legal texts, but I’m not on board when she goes all the way to saying that ancient Mesopotamia had no word for prostitute. I think harimtu is that word, though it also has a meaning, in the legal texts she cites, that means something more like the “independent woman” definition that she offers.

Qedešah is different. I don’t think it necessarily means sacred prostitute, but picked up those associations either because some religions had sexual rites, or because some temples slid toward prostitution when times were desperate, or because Biblical writers wanted to discredit the idea of priestesses altogether, or some combination of all three. I think some combination is most likely, and people strenuously denying one of them are pushing things they want to be true.

While the widespread practice of sacred prostitution doesn’t seem to have been a thing, there are still more associations between priestesses and sex than can be easily dismissed. Here’s one such passage from the “Counsels of Wisdom”:

Do not marry a harimtu who has countless husbands, An ištaritu who is dedicated to a god, A kulmašitu whose favors (?) are many. In your difficulties she will not support you, In your disputes she will mock you. There is no reverence or submissiveness with her, Should she dominate your house, get her out! Her attentions are directly elsewhere!

Two of the three types of women in those lines have strong implications of sexual promiscuity (the harimtu with ”countless husbands”, and the kulmašitu whose “favors are many”). Ištaritu are some kind of priestess to Ištar. Now, maybe the ištaritu had nothing to do with sex, and it’s just a non-sexual dedication to religion that makes them unsuitable for marriage in the opinion of that writer, but it seems to me like sandwiching them in between the harimtu and the kulmašitu carries the strong possibility that there was something sexual about their role. It could legitimately go either way.

My Take on Mesopotamian Sacred Marriage Rites

The world building that I’m doing in A Season of Shades doesn’t connect much with sacred prostitution. Aside from prostitution, were there sexual rites involved in the worship of Inanna, Ištar, Astarte, Asherah, or others in the ancient near east? Well, the sacred marriage rite between Mesopotamian kings and Inanna (represented by her priestess) is described with such specificity that it seems likely to me that it actually happened, though I still leave open the possibility for it to be the symbolic palm libation that Kathleen McCaffrey describes.

What do my world and my story actually need? I’m probably going to have a scene modeled off the Mesopotamian sacred marriage ceremony. Beyond that, the most important thing for my world building is having ancient Mesopotamia as a reference point of a culture where sex was seen very differently than in Victorian England (or even many cultures today). It did not carry the same stigma. It was celebrated in very public and official ways. Why did that change? What was lost, and what was gained?

Silencing the Gremlin

I know I’m overthinking this. I hang myself up by imagining one of these critical historians accusing me of distorting history and contributing to the oppression of women in order to make a buck or indulge my own masturbatory fantasies.

But it’s not rational. I don’t need to convince a PhD thesis committee of anything. I don’t need to get it past peer review. I don’t need to defend it at a symposium. People write all kinds of waaaaay more problematic “dark romance” shit that directly glorifies all kinds of rape, murder, and abuse. Even the lighter side of romantic fiction promotes a lot of gender narratives that feminists have a big problem with. I need to stop trying to preemptively dodge every gripe from every critic. That way madness lies.

But still, even setting aside those gremlins in my head, there’s also this genuine fascination with what folks really believed and did way back at the dawn of civilization. I get excited learning about it, and sharing it. At its best, all this research really deepens the world I’m building and the story I’m telling.

Go back to the story of Tamar and Judah, for example. It’s not one that I’d spent much time with, before this research, but now if I look at it through various moral and cultural lenses, there are all kinds of cool take-homes.

Did qedešah in ancient Canaan have a sexual aspect to their role? Maybe, or maybe not, but it’s definitely clear that people have thought they did, for thousands of years. If they didn’t, then how did it get in there? If the word qedešah was equated with zonah in the Tamar story by Hebrew priests attempting to discredit a competing order of Hebrew priestesses, that is juicy conflict! It fits very neatly into the background story I’m telling about the “Jealous God”.

If qedešah did have a sexual aspect, and the Tamar story accurately reflected it, that works too. It means that some religions once had a far less puritanical approach to sex, even perhaps celebrating it. (Though indiscriminate prostitution doesn’t seem particularly sexy or particularly sacred.)

If I were writing a high fantasy novel the stakes would feel different. In an entirely made-up world, I could make up whatever I want, but would still want to make it feel real given people’s existing understanding of how people work. But A Season of Shades spans both a mostly-made-up demon world and mostly-not-made-up Victorian England. Though it’s more difficult to write in some ways, I like interweaving fantasy elements with real historical facts. It’s not just more believable, for people who already know some history, but also a bit more fun for me.