Sacred Prostitution

The claim that sexual intercourse was performed as a temple ritual in the ancient Near East and Mediterranean rests overwhelmingly on a small number of ancient testimonies, the most cited being Herodotus's account, in his Histories, of every Babylonian woman being required once in her life to have intercourse with a stranger in the precinct of a temple of Aphrodite, alongside Strabo's later description of sacred prostitutes attached to the temple of Aphrodite at Corinth, and biblical polemic against the qedeshah and qadesh, terms often translated cult prostitute, associated with Canaanite worship the Hebrew prophets condemn. These accounts were combined by nineteenth and early twentieth century scholars into a general theory of an ancient Near Eastern institution of sacred or temple prostitution, sexual intercourse understood by its participants as a ritual act, sometimes linked to fertility religion or to the goddess Ishtar or Inanna, and the theory became a standard feature of comparative religion textbooks for much of the twentieth century, cited as an example of how ancient religion differed from later monotheistic sexual ethics. The theory's appeal to earlier generations of scholars owed a great deal to a wider assumption, now itself revised, that ancient Near Eastern religion was organized around fertility cults in which sexuality played a direct ritual role.

Beginning in the later twentieth century, historians of the ancient Near East subjected the sacred prostitution theory to closer scrutiny and found the evidentiary base far thinner than earlier scholarship had assumed. Herodotus, writing as a Greek outsider generations after the practice he describes would have ended, is not corroborated by any surviving Babylonian or Mesopotamian source, cultic, legal or administrative, describing such a custom, despite an extensive surviving textual record from those cultures that would be expected to mention an institution of this scale.

The Hebrew terms qedeshah and qadesh are now generally read by scholars as naming temple personnel with cultic functions unrelated to sex, and the prophetic condemnations that mention them are increasingly read as polemical rhetoric equating foreign worship with sexual immorality rather than as literal ethnographic description.

Stephanie Budin's influential 2008 study argued the entire ancient institution was a scholarly construction built from misread, hostile or literary sources rather than a documented historical practice. This atlas records sacred prostitution as a historiographical subject, a claim with a long and influential history in the study of religion that current scholarship treats as largely unsupported by the ancient evidence it was built on.