Attitudes toward deviant sex in ancient Mesopotamia∗

Abstract

Sex should be regarded as legitimate a subject for historical study as religion or economics or medicirle. If historians are to arrive at a complete picture of the history of humanity the historical evolution of sexual attitudes would seem to be a key to understanding. Such a study becomes particularly important as preliminary to understandirlg our own attitudes towards sex, particularly towards such variant sex practices as homosexuality. The history of sex, however, is not by itself a special branch of history. Rather it overlaps several specialized historical fields such as those of law, religion and philosophy, medicine, social and intellectual history in general. If we could draw a precise picture of sex for each period in history encompassing legislation, religious and philosophical doctrines, public opinion, literature, biographies, it might be possible to arrive at a picture of man's attitudes towards sex. Such studies must be made with care because much of the historical introductory material to works on sex by scholars as noted as Havelock Ellis, Richard von Krafft-Ebing, Albert Moll, or Magnus Hirschfeld, is superficial and unscientific in character. In order to support a psychological or endocrinological theory they simply cited some historical antecedent without taking very seriously what they were doing, and in the process often used documents which were mediocre and unevaluated. In this fashion many errors and old wives' tales, some of which are patently absurd, have been preserved and are cited by numerous studies in sex as being gospel truth simply because they were referred to in the works of men who in their day were great sexologists but were not trained to research historical documents.