Sex in Ancient Mesopotamia: Female Pleasure, Masturbation, and the Sacred Body. How the oldest civilization on earth understood female orgasm — and what we still haven’t caught up on

There is a hymn, inscribed on a clay tablet approximately four thousand years ago in the city-state of Sumer, in which the goddess Inanna sings in explicit and joyful detail about her own body. She praises her vulva. She describes her arousal in agricultural metaphors that leave nothing ambiguous. She celebrates her own desire with the ease of someone who has never been told that her pleasure is secondary, shameful, or irrelevant. (Wolkstein & Kramer, 1983)

She is not confessing. She is not apologizing. She is singing.

This is ancient Mesopotamia — the civilization that gave us writing, the wheel, the first legal codes, and apparently a considerably more sophisticated attitude toward female sexuality than the one many parts of the modern world have managed to achieve in the several thousand years since. (Leick, 1994)

The subject of female masturbation, female orgasm, phallic objects used by women, and sapphic intimacy within heterosexual marriages is not a modern invention. It is documented history — older than Rome, older than Greece, older than most of the religious frameworks that have spent the last two millennia making women feel complicated about their own bodies. Understanding where we came from on this subject is useful. It is also, frankly, overdue.

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Inanna and the Sacred Hymns

The goddess Inanna is central to Sumerian mythology and to any honest discussion of ancient Mesopotamian attitudes toward female sexuality. She was the goddess of love, beauty, war, justice, and political power — a combination that tells you something important about how the Sumerians organized their understanding of the divine. Power and desire were not separated. They were expressions of the same force. (Harris, 1990)

The Inanna hymns, composed approximately 2000 BCE and attributed to the high priestess Enheduanna — herself the first named author in recorded human history, a woman — are explicit in ways that tend to surprise people encountering them for the first time. (Hallo & van Dijk, 1968) The famous passage translated variously as “I shall praise my vulva” or “I shall sing of my wondrous vulva” is not metaphor and is not euphemism. It is Inanna celebrating her own body and its capacity for pleasure, framed as sacred, framed as worthy of song. (Wolkstein & Kramer, 1983)

This is not an isolated passage. The hymns describe Inanna’s sexual desire, her arousal, her body’s responses with the specificity of someone for whom these things are neither shameful nor private in the sense of hidden. They are divine. (Leick, 1994)

When the primary goddess of your culture celebrates her own vulva in song, the framework for female self-knowledge and self-pleasure looks fundamentally different than it does in a culture whose primary religious texts treat the female body as a source of danger or sin.

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Female Masturbation in Medical and Legal Texts

The hymns are the most famous documentation, but they are not the only evidence. Ancient Mesopotamian medical texts, recovered and translated across the last century, contain references to female sexual self-pleasure that treat it as a normal and expected aspect of women’s physical lives. (Scurlock & Andersen, 2005)

Babylonian medical tablets from the second millennium BCE address female sexual frustration and its physical symptoms with the same matter-of-fact practicality applied to other health conditions. The texts describe women who are sexually unfulfilled and prescribe remedies that include direct stimulation of the genitals. The orgasm is presented as therapeutically useful — a health outcome rather than a moral question. (Scurlock & Andersen, 2005; Stol, 2000)

This is strikingly at odds with the trajectory that Western medicine would later take. The Victorian era produced medical texts that described female masturbation as a source of illness, hysteria, and moral degeneracy. (Groneman, 1994) The Babylonians, writing three and a half thousand years earlier, understood that the female orgasm was good for women.

The Code of Hammurabi, dating to approximately 1754 BCE and one of the oldest legal codes in existence, addresses women’s sexual rights within marriage with a directness that many modern legal frameworks still struggle with. While deeply patriarchal in many respects, it encoded protections for women’s sexual interests that acknowledged women as parties with interests rather than simply property. (Roth, 1997)

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The Importance of Female Orgasm in Ancient Marriage

Ancient Mesopotamian marriage culture was complex and varied across the several thousand years of the civilization’s existence. But certain threads are consistent in the surviving documentation: the female orgasm was considered relevant to the success and fertility of a marriage in ways that gave women a recognized stake in their own sexual satisfaction. (Bahrani, 2001)

Fertility was the organizing principle. The Mesopotamians understood, if not scientifically then practically and theologically, that female pleasure was connected to reproductive outcomes. Inanna as the goddess of fertility and love was not coincidentally also the goddess celebrated for her own pleasure. (Harris, 1990)

Marriage contracts from ancient Mesopotamia, particularly from the Assyrian period, include provisions about sexual relations that acknowledge the wife’s interests explicitly. The physical relationship between husband and wife was understood as a matter of mutual contract rather than unilateral access. (Westbrook, 1988)

A woman whose husband was absent — traveling for trade, serving in military campaigns, or otherwise away for extended periods — was not simply expected to wait in celibate isolation. The texts suggest a practical understanding of female sexual needs that acknowledged their existence and made provisions for their management. (Leick, 1994)

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Phallic Objects and Material Evidence

The archaeological record of ancient Mesopotamia includes phallic objects that are not architectural decorations or abstract fertility symbols. They are objects shaped and sized for use. Their presence in domestic contexts, in tombs alongside women, and in temple inventories is well documented in the archaeological literature. (Bahrani, 2001; Black & Green, 1992)

Phallic objects crafted from stone, clay, bone, and wood have been recovered from Mesopotamian sites dating back to at least 2000 BCE. While scholars debate the functional versus symbolic nature of specific objects, the honest reading of the material evidence is that women in ancient Mesopotamia had access to objects designed for sexual self-pleasure. (Leick, 1994)

The qadishtu — the consecrated women who served in the temples of Inanna and other deities — are often misunderstood as simple sex workers. They were women in a recognized religious role that included sexual service as part of sacred ritual. Their bodies, including their pleasure, were not incidental to their sacred function. They were the sacred function. (Assante, 2003)

A culture that places women’s sexual capacity at the center of its religious practice is not a culture that treats female sexuality as shameful. It is a culture that treats it as sacred. (Assante, 2003; Leick, 1994)

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Sapphic Relationships Within Marriage

The evidence for intimate relationships between women in ancient Mesopotamia is less extensive than the evidence for female masturbation and phallic use, but it is present. The Mesopotamian understanding of sexual categories was not organized around the modern Western binary of heterosexual and homosexual. The primary organizing categories were active and passive, and the social significance of these roles varied considerably based on the genders and social statuses of the parties involved. (Leick, 1994; Bahrani, 2001)

Same-sex intimacy between women appears in the surviving texts in ways that suggest it was understood as distinct from the categories applied to male same-sex relations and was viewed with considerably less legal and social anxiety. (Leick, 1994)

The primary concern of ancient Mesopotamian marriage law regarding women’s sexuality was the protection of the husband’s lineage — the certainty of paternity. Intimate relationships between women did not threaten this certainty. They were therefore outside the primary area of legal concern. (Roth, 1997)

The silence of the legal codes on the subject of female same-sex intimacy is itself evidence of a kind. What the law did not prohibit, it did not consider a problem worth legislating. And what was not considered a problem worth legislating had considerably more room to exist quietly within the fabric of ordinary life. (Westbrook, 1988)

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Modern Attitudes: What We Inherited and What We Didn’t

The specific attitudes that replaced the Mesopotamian framework — the association of female sexuality with sin and danger, the pathologizing of female masturbation, the legal and religious prohibition of sapphic intimacy, the removal of female pleasure from the category of things that mattered within marriage — arrived with the rise of the Abrahamic traditions and the Roman imperial framework that spread them. (Foucault, 1978)

Female masturbation was classified as a sin, then as a medical pathology, then as something so embarrassing that the medical establishment declined to study it seriously until the work of Masters and Johnson in the 1960s. (Masters & Johnson, 1966)

Research into the female orgasm has produced a considerably better understanding of female pleasure than the medical establishment had managed for most of its existence. The 2005 anatomical study that mapped the full clitoral structure revealed an organ considerably larger and more significant than the anatomical maps had previously shown. (O’Connell et al., 2005)

Research consistently shows the orgasm gap — the significant difference between the frequency with which heterosexual men and women reach orgasm during partnered sex — as a persistent feature of sexual culture. (Frederick et al., 2018)

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What Ancient Mesopotamia Got Right

The connection between female pleasure and female health is now well documented. Regular orgasm in women is associated with reduced stress, improved sleep, reduced risk of certain health conditions, and improved mood. (Komisaruk et al., 2006)

The Babylonian physicians who prescribed stimulation for sexually frustrated women were not wrong. They were operating from a practical understanding that preceded the theoretical framework but arrived at a correct conclusion.

The importance of female orgasm within marriage is now widely acknowledged, though practice continues to lag behind acknowledgment. The Mesopotamians, who embedded female pleasure in the theological framework of their civilization and encoded it in their legal understanding of marriage, would have found the orgasm gap puzzling. They had organized an entire sacred tradition around the premise that female pleasure mattered. (Frederick et al., 2018; Bahrani, 2001)

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The Takeaway

Ancient Mesopotamia was not a utopia. It was patriarchal, hierarchical, and organized around assumptions of gender difference that we would not endorse wholesale. This is not an argument for returning to anything.

It is an argument for recognizing that the specific attitudes toward female sexuality that have caused so much damage across the last two millennia — the shame, the pathologizing, the legal harassment, the deliberate ignorance about how the female body works and what it needs — are not ancient wisdom. They are a historical accident. A narrowing. A loss of something that the civilization that invented writing had managed to get more right than many of its successors.

Female masturbation is healthy. The female orgasm matters in marriage and matters outside it. Phallic objects have been part of women’s lives for at least four thousand documented years. Sapphic intimacy between women who are also married to men is not new and has never required the legal prohibition it has received.

Inanna sang about her own body with joy and pride four thousand years ago. The idea that this required centuries of unlearning and is now, slowly, being relearned is not a comfortable one. But it is accurate. And accuracy, in a conversation this important, is the least we owe ourselves.

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Sources

Assante, J. (2003). From Whore to Holy Woman: A Reappraisal of the Qadishtu in the Ancient Near East. In S. Parpola & R.M. Whiting (Eds.), Sex and Gender in the Ancient Near East (pp. 13–43). Neo-Assyrian Text Corpus Project.

Bahrani, Z. (2001). Women of Babylon: Gender and Representation in Mesopotamia. Routledge.

Black, J.A. & Green, A. (1992). Gods, Demons and Symbols of Ancient Mesopotamia: An Illustrated Dictionary. British Museum Press.

Foster, B.R. (1993). Before the Muses: An Anthology of Akkadian Literature. CDL Press.

Foucault, M. (1978). The History of Sexuality, Vol. 1: An Introduction. Pantheon Books.

Frederick, D.A., John, H.K.S., Garcia, J.R., & Lloyd, E.A. (2018). Differences in Orgasm Frequency Among Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, and Heterosexual Men and Women in a U.S. National Sample. Archives of Sexual Behavior, 47(1), 273–288.

Groneman, C. (1994). Nymphomania: The Historical Construction of Female Sexuality. Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, 19(2), 337–367.

Hallo, W.W. & van Dijk, J.J.A. (1968). The Exaltation of Inanna. Yale University Press.

Harris, R. (1990). Inanna-Ishtar as Paradox and a Coincidence of Opposites. History of Religions, 30(3), 261–278.

Komisaruk, B.R., Beyer-Flores, C., & Whipple, B. (2006). The Science of Orgasm. Johns Hopkins University Press.

Leick, G. (1994). Sex and Eroticism in Mesopotamian Literature. Routledge.

Masters, W.H. & Johnson, V.E. (1966). Human Sexual Response. Little, Brown and Company.

O’Connell, H.E., Sanjeevan, K.V., & Hutson, J.M. (2005). Anatomy of the Clitoris. Journal of Urology, 174(4), 1189–1195.

Roth, M.T. (1997). Law Collections from Mesopotamia and Asia Minor (2nd ed.). Scholars Press.

Scurlock, J. & Andersen, B.R. (2005). Diagnoses in Assyrian and Babylonian Medicine: Ancient Sources, Translations, and Modern Medical Analyses. University of Illinois Press.

Stol, M. (2000). Birth in Babylonia and the Bible: Its Mediterranean Setting. Styx Publications.

Westbrook, R. (1988). Old Babylonian Marriage Law. Archiv für Orientforschung.

Wolkstein, D. & Kramer, S.N. (1983). Inanna: Queen of Heaven and Earth. Harper & Row.

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