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Once in her life, every woman in Babylon had to sit near the temple of the goddess of love. The rich arrived in closed carriages with their servants. The poor came on foot. She couldn't go home until a stranger threw silver into her lap. The beauties left on the same day. The unattractive ones, as Herodotus writes, waited three or four years. And that is why Babylon is remembered as a city of sin. But did this really happen? And what happened in the Babylonian bedroom? The author of this story is Herodotus, the father of history. In the middle of the 5th century BC. he describes Babylon as the most wonderful city in the world, and then immediately adds that the Babylonians have a custom that he calls the most shameful of all.
Women sit in the sacred grove of the temple, with wreaths of braided cords on their heads. Ropes are stretched between the women, forming passages through which the men walk, choosing their companion. A coin is thrown into the lap of the chosen woman. The man pronounces the name of the goddess. The Babylonians supposedly called it Miletus. And the woman has to go with the one who dumped her first. The amount doesn't matter. The coin becomes sacred. After that she goes home. And, according to Herodotus, no amount of money will tempt her anymore. Herodotus has other details about Babylon. Once a year, a bride auction was supposedly held in each village The most beautiful girls
were sold first. The rich competed for them, and the money exchanged went as dowries for the less beautiful ones, so that someone would also take them as wives. And after intimacy, the husband and wife supposedly sat over smoking incense, bathed at dawn, and did not touch any dishes until they washed. This reads like an eyewitness report, but this is where the questions arise. Historians still argue about whether Herodotus ever set foot in Babylon at all. As for the auction of brides, he himself admits that this custom no longer existed in his time. And most importantly: nothing like this was ever found among the
Babylonians themselves. Not in their laws, not in temple records, not in letters, not in contracts. Thousands of plaques about who sold what to whom, who married whom, and who sued whom. And no mention of the sacred duty that every woman had . In 2008, historian Stephanie Boudin explored this issue in detail in her own book. Her conclusion: The Akkadian and Sumerian words commonly translated as " temple prostitution" actually mean something different. And the story of the Babylonian women in the temple was born thanks to Herodotus. Later authors simply copied it from his works. Why would he make this up? Because the Greeks needed the image of the East as a world turned upside down by a dragon. Where the Greeks had honor, the
barbarians had shame. Budin is not alone in her views. Most modern Assyriologists share her conclusion. The discussion is not yet fully concluded. Some consider parts of her argument too bold. To be fair, Herodotus has one piece of evidence to support it. The Bible, in the so-called Epistle of Jeremiah, describes Babylonian women sitting by the roadsides with ropes around their bodies, burning bran instead of incense. When a passerby takes one of them with him, she then mocks her neighbor: "You were not found worthy. No one broke your rope." But this text was also written by an outside observer, a Jew, for whom Babylon was a city of exile and a symbol of all abominations. And later, Greeks and Romans, such as Strabo, simply retold Herodotus, sometimes
moving the action to another country. Herodotus himself, by the way, claimed that the same custom existed in Cyprus. So, there is no Babylonian witness to this story. Each of its narrators is a foreigner, and each wrote about a foreign people for their own audience. The most interesting thing is that Herodotus knew where his information ended. Describing the Babylonian ziggurat, he says that at the very top stands a temple without a statue, with only a huge bed and a golden table. Every night, one woman sleeps there, chosen, according to local priests, by the god himself. And God supposedly comes to her and lies down on that bed with her. And here Herodotus adds: "I don't believe it." So, he refused to believe one Babylonian story
about sacred intimacy, but he readily believed another. Several centuries after him, the Roman historian Quintus Curtius Rufus described the entry of Alexander the Great's army into Babylon. According to him, no city had more depraved customs. Husbands and fathers gave their wives and daughters to strangers for money. The Babylonians drank endlessly, and women at feasts started out in modest clothing and gradually shed everything. And not just hired women, but respectable mothers of families as well. This sounds like testimony, but Curtius was writing many centuries later about a city he had never seen himself. And he wrote a moral lesson about how Eastern luxury corrupts soldiers. This is the third external
narrator. And for all three, Babylon looks the same: debauched, drunken, and sold. And here's what the great festival of Babylon looked like, according to the records of the Babylonians themselves. Every spring, in the first month of the year, the king came to the temple of Marduk. The high priest took his scepter, ring, weapons, and crown and placed them in front of the statue of the god. Then he hit the king in the face. The king would kneel down and list the things he had not done. He did not sin, did not neglect the gods, did not destroy Babylon, did not strike his subjects in the face. The priest beat him again. And then comes the most important part. If tears came to the king's eyes from the blow
, the god was favorable to him. If not, the god was angry, and an enemy would rise up to destroy the king. Only after that was his regalia returned to him. This is what true Babylonian religion is: not orgies outside the temple walls, but the most powerful man in the land on his knees with a burning cheek. And this is not the only Babylonian document of this kind. There are thousands of them. There was a judge in Babylon who never listened to excuses and handed down a verdict in a matter of minutes. This judge was the river. But to understand how a woman ended up in front of her, you have to start with the stone. Around 1750 BC. The Babylonian king Hammurabi ordered a code of laws to be engraved on a stone pillar. The fate of the pillar itself reads like a
novel. Six centuries later, an Elamite king took it to Susa as a war trophy. And it was there that French archaeologists found it at the very beginning of the 20th century. Today it stands in the Louvre. Almost a third of his laws concern marriage, family, and what happens behind closed bedroom doors. The first thing that catches your eye: marriage in Babylon was primarily a contract. The law says it plainly: if a man takes a wife without a written contract, she is not his wife. The groom pays the bride's family a ransom, and her family gives her a dowry, and this dowry is the wife's money, not the husband's. In the event of a divorce, he
stays with her. The marriage contracts themselves have also been preserved, and some of them specify what will happen if one of the spouses utters fatal words. A man who says to his wife, "You are not my wife," pays in silver. A wife who tells her husband, "You are not my husband," has taken a much greater risk, even to the point of being thrown into a river. Same sentence, but the price is completely different. By the way, the divorce did not necessarily have to be initiated by the husband. If the wife declared that she no longer wished to share his bed, her case was considered, and if it was found that she had behaved with dignity, while her husband had
never been home and humiliated her, she would take her dowry and return to her father. No shame. But if the investigation showed that it was her fault, that she had been loitering, neglected the house, and dishonored her husband, she was thrown into the river. The law did not ignore infertility. If a wife could not have children, she could give her husband a slave to bear them for him. The child was considered legitimate, but the law also provided for further developments. If a slave, after giving birth to a child, began to behave as an equal to her mistress, the mistress had the right to brand her as a slave and return her to the number of servants. However, from then on it could no longer be sold. And if his wife was seriously
ill, the husband could take a second wife, but he was obliged to support the first one for the rest of her life and had no right to expel her. Now about adultery. If a wife was caught with another man, both were tied up and thrown into the river, with one exception: the husband could pardon his wife. And if he forgave her, the king forgave his lover too. So, the last word was not with the court, but with the offended man. If no one caught the wife in the act, but there were only rumors and people pointing fingers, she was sent to be tested by the river.
The woman jumped into the water herself. If she surfaced, the gods declared her innocent. If she drowned, she was to blame. In Babylon, the river was the judge, and its verdict could not be appealed. But if it was her husband who accused her, without finding her with anyone, it was enough for her to swear an oath by God, and she could go home in peace. The law also protected brides. If a man forcibly took away a girl who was already engaged to another man and who still lived in her father's house, he was executed, and she was declared innocent. Prohibitions on intimate relationships with relatives are also outlined point by point.
A man who had an affair with his own daughter was banished from the city, and a son who slept with his mother after his father's death was burned with her. And another law that says more about Babylon than it seems at first glance. There were women called nadita, dedicated to the god. The most famous of them lived in the city of Sippar, in a closed monastery of the sun god. They did not marry and were forbidden to have children. But they owned land, borrowed money, traded, and sued on an equal footing with men. They were among the most independent women of the ancient world. And if one of them opened a tavern or just went there
to drink beer, she was burned. The taverns in Babylon were run by women, and these establishments had such a reputation that a woman dedicated to a god had no business there. A woman who went out with her head covered could be flogged with 50 strokes of a cane and have hot tar poured on her head. Her only crime was that she wasn't allowed to cover it. To the north of Babylon lay Assyria, and its laws were even stricter. The Middle Assyrian code, which has come down to us on tablets from Assyria, does for the first time in history what He divides women into decent and immoral based on what they wear. A married woman must cover her head when going outside. So is the widow. A priestess covers her head if she is married, and
walks with it uncovered if she is not. But prostitutes and slaves are forbidden to cover theirs. The headscarf is a sign that this woman belongs to someone and cannot be touched. The tablets with these laws date back to approximately the 11th century BC . Almost 3,000 years before any modern debates about who should cover their heads and how. If a prostitute was seen on the street wearing a headscarf, any man was obliged to grab her and bring her to the palace. She was flogged with 50 blows of a cane and hot tar was poured on her head. The man who grabbed her was taking her clothes. And if a man saw such a woman and did not report her, he would be punished himself. The same 50 lashes, a month of labor for the king, and a rope pulled
through pierced ears. A slave caught with her head covered had her ears cut off. The Assyrian law on adultery also leaves the decision up to the husband, but makes it mirror-image. If a man, having caught them, killed his wife, he was obliged to kill his lover as well. If he cut off his wife's nose, the lover was made a eunuch and his face disfigured. What she got, he got. The law does not so much protect a man as it prevents him from forgiving one woman and taking revenge on another. And another Assyrian law, unexpected for us. If a man slept with his comrade-in-arms, he himself was made a eunuch. It would seem that
everything is clear - a ban. But other texts from the same world paint a more complex picture. One Mesopotamian prophecy promised a man that he would become the first among his brothers if he spent the night with another man. And not with just anyone. The Mesopotamians believed that the future could be read in everything. In the flight of birds, in the liver of a sacrificial ram, in the way a drop of oil fell on water, and in the way a man spent the night. There was a huge collection of prophecies called "If the City Stands on High," over 10,000 entries foretelling various events. It was compiled and copied throughout the first millennium BC for centuries from scribe to scribe. Two of her tablets are entirely
devoted to intimacy, with over a hundred prophecies. And in almost all of them, the man is the doer, and the woman is the receiver. If the roles are reversed and the woman prevails, the prophecy becomes bad. But there are also prophecies about intimacy between men, and here the verdict depends not on gender, but on status. If a man sleeps with his equal, says one of them, he will become the first among his brothers and companions. If he shares a bed with a courtier for a whole year, the anxiety that tormented him will pass. If with a slave, misfortune will befall him. For the Mesopotamian, it was not important who was with whom, but who was in charge. For them, intimacy was primarily the language of power. And that brings us to the most
controversial figure in this entire world. One day, the earth stopped giving birth to children- neither people nor animals, all living things simply turned away from each other, because one goddess was captured. Ishtar, the Sumerians called her Inanna, the goddess of love and carnal desire, and at the same time the goddess of war. This seems like a strange combination to us. For a Mesopotamian, this was logical. Both are forces against which man is powerless. How important this power was is best shown by the myth of its descent into the underworld. Ishtar goes down to visit her sister, the queen of the dead, and is captured there. And at that moment when the goddess of love disappears from the earth,
desire disappears with her. The bull no longer impregnates the cow. The donkey no longer goes to the donkey. The man no longer approaches the girl. Everyone sleeps alone, with their faces turned away. The world freezes, and the gods, in a panic, are forced to bring Ishtar back. Without it, life simply stops. Her cult left behind some of the most candid poetry of the ancient world. Songs about Inanna and her lover, the shepherd Dumuzi, were translated for centuries with omissions because the translators were embarrassed. The story begins with a matchmaking. Two suitors ask for the goddess's hand in marriage: a shepherd and a farmer. At first, Inanna leans towards the farmer, but her brother persuades her to choose the shepherd, and he ultimately wins. And
from that moment on, Inanna openly speaks about her body in songs and asks who plows her field. She is not talking about agriculture. Dumuzi replies that he sees him, he, the king. Scholars once believed that these songs were performed during a sacred marriage ceremony, where the king united with a goddess in the person of a priestess. Whether this ritual was literal or merely symbolic is still debated, but Ishtar is dangerous to those she loves. In the Epic of Gilgamesh, she offers herself to the hero, but Gilgamesh refuses. And he explains why by listing her past lovers.
Dumuzi, whom she condemned to eternal tears. A spotted bird whose wing she broke. The lion for whom she dug traps. The horse she gave up for the whip and spurs. The shepherd turned into a wolf, now chased by his own dogs. The gardener she turned into a pitiful creature. The offended goddess demands the Heavenly Bull from her father to Next to Ishtar lived her servants. People who don't fit into our categories. In a later epic, it is said that the goddess herself transformed the masculine into feminine in them in order to arouse awe in people. For a long time, these people were considered temple prostitutes. Today, many researchers believe that it was simply a special priestly role. One in which gender ceased to matter. In one of the oldest
epics of humanity, a savage transforms into a human. Not with fire, not with weapons, and not with words. A woman does this in 6 days and 7 nights. This is the most famous scene of intimacy in Mesopotamian literature, and it is not about gods. At the beginning of the Epic of Gilgamesh, the gods create the savage Enkidu. He lives in the steppe among animals. It eats grass with gazelles, drinks with them at the watering hole, and destroys hunting traps. How to stop it? A hunter leads a woman named Shamhat to a watering hole. She undresses in front of Enkidu, and for 6 days and 7 nights he does not leave her even a step. And then comes the decisive moment. Enkidu returns to his animals, but the gazelles flee from
him. He is no longer one of them. His legs no longer carry him as fast as they used to. But, as the epic says, he gained understanding. Shamhat takes him to the city, teaches him to eat bread and drink beer, and clothes him. Intimacy with a woman transformed the beast into a human. There is a continuation to this story. Much later, as he dies, Enkidu is cursed by Shamhat. She led him out of the steppe. Because of her, he became a man, and now he dies as a man. And then the sun god Shamash reminds him that it was she who gave him bread, beer, clothes, and a friend- Gilgamesh. Enkidu calms down, takes back the curse, and blesses
her. Shamhat is usually called a harlot, but there are nuances to this. Researcher Julia Assante has proven that the word used for her may simply mean an unmarried woman who lives alone. And then the whole scene is perceived completely differently. Not as a story about corrupt love, but as a story about a woman who makes a man human. Tablets were found in the library of the ruler of the largest empire of that time, which he probably did not show to ambassadors. And now about what, apparently, worried Mesopotamian men the most. Among the tablets is a whole collection of spells, which in Sumerian were called by a phrase meaning "elevation of the heart." And the heart is not at all in this case. This is a spell against male impotence.
Some of the oldest texts in history on this topic. Many of them were found in the library of the Assyrian king Ashurbanipal in Nineveh. The ruler of that empire considered it necessary to keep such texts at hand. They were not collected and published as a separate book until 1967. They call upon the help of the most powerful beasts that the world has ever known. Wild ram, deer, bull, stallion. The man asks that his strength be like theirs. The spells are accompanied by instructions for the ritual. What to prepare, what to rub, what to say and at what moment. It sounds funny, but behind these signs lies real
fear. In a world where marriage was a contract and the main goal was an heir, a man's failure was not a personal misfortune, but a threat to the entire lineage. And this is perhaps the most important thing that the No sacred orgies near the temple walls . Instead-marriage contracts, dowry disputes, jealousy, fear of betrayal, fear of infertility, fear of impotence. Love songs that made were worried about the same things 4,000 years ago that people are worried about today. So why do we still believe Herodotus? Because it was always read. Herodotus, Ctesias, the Bible-they were all continuously copied for over 2,000 years. Cuneiform was meanwhile forgotten. And the Babylonian tablets lay in the ground until they were dug up and someone
learned to read them just a few centuries ago. The outsider's account of Babylon became fact long before Babylon itself could deny it. The Babylon that emerged from the tablets is much less exotic than that of Herodotus, but much more alive. This is not a city of lewd women at the temple gates. This is a city where a woman could leave her husband and take her own. Where the husband decided whether the unfaithful wife would live. Where men were afraid of losing their power. And women sang about love in a way that 20th-century scholars hesitated to translate. The Greek saw in Babylon what he wanted to see. The Babylonians simply lived their lives.
