The name of Babylon, today, is used as a synonym for evil and debauchery. Our view of the ancient empire is colored by biblical history, and it’s not exactly flattering. It calls Babylon the “mother of prostitutes and of earth’s abominations” and says that “happy is he who takes your little ones and dashes them against the rocks.”

In its time, though, Babylon was one of the world’s most powerful cities, a name uttered with awe. Much of the real Babylon has been lost to time, but archaeologists have found pieces. Through them, we glimpse into one of the world’s first great civilizations.

10A Babylonian Home

In 1899, archaeologists found the city of Babylon itself. Inside, they saw a hint of what life was like in an ordinary Babylonian home.

Babylon was made without stones. Every building and every wall was built out of clay bricks. Those bricks were glazed with color and pictures of gods, beasts, and men. The walls of the city were coated in lapis lazuli, a blue mineral worth its weight in gold.

A Babylonian home would be built out of clay bricks, as well. Most would be on dusty, unpaved roads, off the side of the main streets. Many would be a single room leading out into an open court, though some with a little more wealth would have extra rooms attached.

Inside, they kept decorative pots and lanterns, glazed with little dashes of color to bring it alive. The children would have small clay toys or toy terracotta ships to play with. The grown men would gamble, playing games with the ankle bones of animals.

9Babylonian Medicine

When Babylonians walked down to the marketplace, they would see more than just shopkeepers. Sick people would be sitting there, too, and they were everyone’s responsibility. No matter who you were, you were expected to take a minute to give them your best medical advice.

The elite didn’t have to do this. They could go to the temple. There, a sorcerer might sit down with them and explain what evil they’d committed to anger the gods and what charms they need to make penance. Or they might get a doctor, who would be trained to make plaster casts and to perform surgery.

The poor, though, were not so lucky. They would have to take care of their own, usually in their own home. That’s why they would go out to the marketplace, where people would pass by and, if they’d suffered the same symptoms, let him know how they treated it.

Babylonian medical tablets show they based all their medicine on what had worked in the past. They call medicines “tried and tested“ and pass them down. One, for example, outlines an illness a woman had 1,500 years ago and the way she treated it, passing a remedy that worked down through the centuries.

8Erotic Clay Plaques

Babylon was considered unusually sexually open, even by the standards of ancient kingdoms. According to the historian Jean Bottero, people would have sex out in the open—sometimes on the terrace of their homes and sometimes even on the streets.

We know for sure that they passed out around little terracotta plates that showed people in the act, like ancient issues of Playboy. There is a whole Kamasutra-like range of techniques displayed on these things. There was no taboo on them—they were everywhere. Archaeologists have found them in homes, in temples, and even buried with the dead in their graves.

It’s easy to imagine how uncomfortable the Israelites, who give us much of our understanding of Babylon today, must have been when they walked through Babylon. In ancient Israel, sexual art was few and far between. To them, Babylon’s sexuality made it a depraved place.

7The Temple Of Ishtar

One of the strangest Babylonian traditions, according to the Greek writer Herodotus, took place at the Temple of Ishtar. At least once in her life, a woman had to come there, and she wouldn’t be allowed to leave until she’d slept with somebody for money.

We’ve unearthed some of these temples. One was found at the top of the city, on an acropolis where the king kept his royal seat of power. Next to his royal seat is a temple to Ishtar, the goddess of love and war. It is upon a massive stone terrace with a ramp leading up to it and, in its prime, is believed to have been a gigantic ziggurat that towered into the sky.

“Here when a woman takes her seat she does not depart again to her house until one of the strangers has thrown a silver coin into her lap and has had commerce with her outside the temple,” Herodotus says. It was easier for some women than others. “Some of them remain even as much as three or four years.”

6Fortune-Telling

The Babylonians believed they could see the future in a sheep’s liver. When they needed to make an important decision, they would cut the liver of a sheep’s body to predict how it would go.

They’ve left behind clay models of livers, mapped with abnormalities that they believed indicated different fates. Some would be for specific purposes. One, for example, marked with the words “destruction of a small town,” was consulted whenever a Babylonian king was considering razing a village to the ground

Different cultures viewed this in different ways. The Greeks thought they were on to something and copied them. The Israelites, on the other hand, viewed it as a type of dark, foreign sorcery and as something to be feared.

5Astronomy

Babylonian astronomers would climb up to the top of their great ziggurats and watch the movements of the stars in the sky. The stars were a major part of their religion, and they made some incredible advances in astronomy centuries before anybody else.

The Babylonians, we’ve learned, discovered the Pythagorean theorem 1,000 years before Pythagoras was born. They spotted Venus, tracked Haley’s comet, and tracked Jupiter using mathematical techniques that European society didn’t develop until the 14th century.

Their astronomy was incredibly advanced—but that doesn’t mean they understood what space was. As accurately as they tracked the planets, they just used them for astrology. They believed that the constellations were placed there by the gods, and movements in the skies were a portent of things to come.

Oddly enough, in some ways, their astrology worked. They were able to track the changes in a season by where a constellation was in the sky—so, when they predicted a strong harvest, they were often right.

4The Ritual For Eclipses

Of all the cosmic warnings across the sky, an eclipse was the most terrifying. The Babylonians believed they brought on catastrophes, murders, and rebellions. We’ve found a tablet that tells us exactly what they did during an eclipse—and it was a pretty intense reaction.

First, they were to light an altar on fire. Then every Babylonian was to take off anything they might be wearing on their head and, instead, pull their clothes over their heads. With their tunics over their heads, they sang dirges, begging the gods to protect their fields and not to destroy them with floods.

At the end, they broke into tears and begged the gods to spare them. The crying was scheduled. Part of the ritual required the people to have an emotional breakdown.

3The Adoption Of An Abandoned Baby

A contract between a priestess and the state has been found, revealing the compassionate side of the Babylonians. A priestess, it states, had found a newborn baby abandoned at a well and snatched it “from the mouth of a dog.”

That part wasn’t too unusual. Abandoning babies to die was a fairly standard practice in most nations in those times. In Rome, parents were required by law to abandon babies that were deformed. In Babylon, though, it seems to have been handled differently.

The priestess adopted the baby as her son. The Babylonian state, the tablet reveals, took this type of gesture very seriously. Not only did they approve of the priestess’s actions, but they set up consequences to ensure that she cared for the child as her own.

“If Simat-Adad, the nugig, says to him, ‘You are not my son!,’ ” the tablet warns, “she shall forfeit house, field, orchard, female and male slaves, possessions and utensils, as much as there may be.”

2The Lives Of Conquered People

When a nation was defeated by Babylon, the people were relocated to new parts of their empire. It happened to the Israelites, which was a lot of the reason they hated Babylon so much.

We’ve found tablets that track the lives of Israelites in Babylon, revealing they had more freedom than expected. At the very least, they were not treated as slaves—they were allowed to live their lives. They signed contracts, traded commodities, paid taxes, and received loans.

That doesn’t mean the Babylonians were saints. They slaughtered the Israelites’ babies, destroyed their city, and tore them from their homes. There were plenty of good reasons to hate them.

Because the Babylonians gave them rights, though, some didn’t hold the grudge forever. As time passed and the memory of the tragedy became fainter, some Israelites integrated into Babylonian society. In time, they would have become indistinguishable from their conquerors.

1The Graves Of Dead Babylonians

Along the city walls of Babylon are the graves of their dead. When a Babylonian reached the end of his days, his body was brought there, and he was buried under the earth. Their bodies were stretched out at full length and usually were buried unadorned, without any casket or tomb. Sometimes, though, they would be wrapped up in reed mats or walled in with bricks.

Some would be buried with the possessions they had in life. Graves would be filled with beads. According to Herodotus, some of their graves would even be filled to the brim would honey.

They would rarely be buried with their weapons. For their time, the Babylonians were a peaceful people—lovers and not fighters.

Throughout the ages, different cultures have had vastly different sexual practices, ranging from mundane to bizarre. Like culture itself, sexuality is more than just a means of procreation; it is an expression of the dominant ideas of the time and can tell us a lot about what’s floating around in the collective zeitgeist of a particular society—and ourselves as a species. So it goes without saying that if we peer into the sexual lives of the distant past, we find hints of ourselves, no matter how different they may have been in their expression of this fundamentally universal human activity.

Babylon (or Babylonia) was one of the first civilizations in existence, a region of settlements that is believed to have been initially established around 4000 BC.^[1] Famous for the Code of Hammurabi, Babylon was a society rich with culture, including a detailed writing system, accounting with mathematics, a diverse cuisine, and, of course, sex, with even the wild and lusty Greeks viewing the Babylonians as a sex-obsessed culture. Here is a glance into the world of Babylon, told through the lens of ten facts about sex in the ancient civilization.

10 Sex With Strangers

Greek sources tell us much about the sex lives of the Babylonian people, and needless to say, Babylon had some sexual practices which would make us in modern times raise an eyebrow, with even the Greeks thinking them a vile culture when it came to their sexual norms.

One of these practices was having sex with strangers, as told by the Greek writer Herodotus. He describes a bizarre and unusual practice in which Babylonian women were sent to a temple, once in their lives, to have sex with a complete stranger.^[2] It’s almost as if it could be seen as a rite of passage for women in ancient Babylon, and this was apparently a very widespread practice, accepted and performed by pretty much every single Babylonian woman. Note that some historians have disputed the specifics of Herodotus’s account but do accept that cultic prostitution existed in Babylon. (More on that below.)

9 Temple Prostitution

Temple prostitution was replete throughout the ancient world in and around the Fertile Crescent.^[3] This practice dates all the way back to the ancient Sumerian culture, which began in 4500 BC and from which Babylonian culture sprang up. Babylon is believed to have had dedicated temples set up specifically for prostitution. These divine brothels were more than just a place where people bought sex—this was a truly religious experience for the ancient Babylonians.

The exchange here wasn’t even sex for money; it was a communal, ritualistic practice to give thanks and worship to the gods of ancient Babylon. This was both quite a unique practice for the Babylonians and similar cultures in the ancient Middle East and a staple of their religious lives.

8 The Sin Of Chastity

In an interesting twist from the Judeo-Christian culture we’ve erected since the days of ancient Babylon, in Babylonian culture, it was actually sinful not to have sex.^[4] According to Herodotus’s account of women being sent once in their lives to a temple for sex, the first man to throw a coin into her lap got to have sex with her. Whether he was rich or poor, young or old, she was obliged to indulge him, irrespective of his or her social status. Herodotus also wrote of less formal prostitution outside of the temples, wherein a man would allow someone to have sex with his wife or children, so long as the sex was paid for.

So basically, if anyone wanted sex in ancient Babylon, it was theirs for the taking. While some sources today have referred to this as rape, it was widespread and socially acceptable in Babylonian culture, which had a near-fetish for fertility. This was a deep part of their religious experience, acts of offering and worship to their sex goddess Innana (also known as Ishtar). Just think about that: There was a culture on Earth where it was considered a sin to turn down sex, proving, once again, that if humans can dream it, and it’s sexual, they will do it.

7 Debauched Dinners

Orgies and prostitution were pretty common in the ancient world, and Babylon was no exception. However, free love and open sexuality weren’t restricted to massive annual or semiannual festivals, and sex would take place in common settings. Herodotus tells us of lavish, steamy dinner parties and how they would go down. Essentially, the ancient Babylonians would have orgies that started off as simple dinner parties but, bit by bit, would progress into something that would take on a more sexual nature.

As the dinners would proceed, Herodotus noted that women would undress piece by piece, until they were totally in the nude.^[5] From here, we can only imagine the wild nights that ensued, and Herodotus noted that it was customary for dinner parties to lead to completely socially acceptable prostitution, which even the Greeks thought absolutely bizarre.

6 Consecration

The Code of Hammurabi says much about the sex practices of the day and the laws that concerned them. In ancient Babylon, every marriage needed to be consecrated with sex, and a marriage wasn’t official until the newlyweds actually had intercourse.

Etched into a surviving stone tablet from 1754 BC, Hammurabi’s Code says, “If a man takes a woman to wife, but has no intercourse with her or does not draw up a marriage contract, this woman is no wife to him.”^[6] So if you wanted to take a woman’s hand in marriage, drew up a marriage contract, and handled the whole nine yards, none of it was actually official until some actual sex took place.

5 Sex Everywhere

The Babylonians weren’t bashful or shy when it came to getting down and dirty; they would do it anytime, anywhere, and seemingly with anyone, whenever they wanted. Babylonians would openly have sex in the center of town, go for a midday excursion out in the countryside, or even climb up atop a rooftop and decide to do the nasty overlooking the city.^[7]

It really didn’t matter much, and nobody minded, as they were an extremely sexually open culture. From temples to rooftops, to the good, old-fashioned bedroom, the Babylonians did it everywhere. One can only imagine an entire city of people having sex all over the place, a rather bizarre mental image indeed.

4 Marriage Markets

Marriage markets were another peculiar part of Babylonian culture. Massive markets would be set up, and women of age were sold off to the highest bidder. Herodotus is once again the writer who handed down our knowledge about these markets, describing in detail exactly how they operated.

Apparently, all of the women would sit down, and, not unlike a modern beauty pageant, one woman would be asked to stand and take the center stage, at which point the men in the audience would begin to place their bids on her, until she was sold. This was done in a particular order, too, starting from what was considered the most attractive and working their way down to what was considered least attractive woman.^[8]

Considering everything else we know about Babylonian sex culture, this was most probably a meat market of sorts, where men would buy the wives that they happened to desire. They would soon need to have sex with them to make the marriage official, of course.

3 Eye For An Eye

The Code of Hammurabi remains famous to this day for its general tone of “an eye for an eye,” explicitly stating which punishments were just and right for which transgressions and wrongdoings. Of course, sex was no exception to this . . . and sometimes their idea of what constituted “an eye for an eye,” was unusual, to say the least.

In a similar legal text dating back to the ancient days of Babylon, we’re told of another policy, whereby if a man is the father of an intact virgin, and another man has sex with her, the father of the virgin is then allowed to take and do with that man’s wife as he pleases. He would then be justly entitled to “ravage her.” However, in Hammurabi‘s version of this same situation, if a man had sex with a father’s untouched virgin (who is betrothed to another man), the man would be put to death and the woman would be spared to live.^[9]

2 Adultery

It might surprise you given what’s been covered so far, but adultery carried a high price in Babylon. Such a crime would warrant a punishment of execution, and not exactly a nice method of execution, either: A wife caught cheating on her husband would be forcibly drowned. Hammurabi’s Code tells us what the prescribed punishment should be in quite great detail, saying that if a wife of one man is caught red-handed in the act of cheating, both her and the man she was cheating with should be bound with rope and thrown into the water until they both drowned.

However, supposing the husband of the wife wanted to spare her life, he could opt to not press charges and forgive her, and in this case, the king at the time would reserve the same right to opt to spare the man she was cheating with. If the husband who had been betrayed did not care to save his wife, however, the king was powerless to save either life, and both would be sentenced to die.^[10]

1 Homosexuality

Like most other cultures on Earth before the Judeo-Christian domination which took place after Constantine made Christianity the official religion of ancient Rome, the Babylonians felt no sense of social stigma about homosexuality, and like the ancient Greeks, they practiced it openly and freely. They did, however, have specific homosexual acts which were thought to bring about bad fortune, though others were thought to bring good fortune. It has been noted by scholars that Babylonian men sometimes liked to assume the role of women in sex, but to do so was looked down upon.^[11]

Since anal sex wasn’t off limits, the ancient Babylonians even used heterosexual anal sex as a form of contraception, meaning they understood the processes that led to pregnancy, and it’s also very possible that homosexual sex served as an alternative to this same end; to avoid pregnancy. Nonetheless, the Babylonians were kinky freaks by today’s standards in a lot of ways, and very little was off-limits.

I like to write about dark stuff, history, horror, and murder. Also sex.