Reviews for Myth of Sacred Prostitution in Antiquity

The average rating for Myth of Sacred Prostitution in Antiquity based on 2 reviews is 3 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2020-11-29 00:00:00 Mary Morhart The purpose of Stephanie L. Budin's monograph is easy enough to ascertain from the title. She endeavors to explain why the practice of sacred prostitution is a myth, a fallacy perpetuated by thousands of years of mistaken translations and interpretations by scholars and ancient writers. To Budin, sacred prostitution is nothing but "a sketch of an artificial conglomeration of ideas that have been pulled together over the centuries into the image of a ritual or institution or practice." This publication is an attempt to settle the debated existence of sacred prostitution once and for all. Budin attempts to make this point by analyzing evidence from a variety of ancient societies, including ancient Mesopotamia, Greece, and Rome. In Chapter 1, she introduces the reader to the topic of her book and states how she will prove her thesis through contextualization, literary analysis, and negative evidence. Budin provides an exhaustive list of definitions for the term 'sacred prostituiton,' citing a plethora of dictionaries and scholars before providing her own definition, ("sacred prostitution is the sale of a person's body for sexual purposes where some or all portions of the money/goods received for the transaction belongs to a deity"), from which she will base her many conclusions. She then primes the reader for the remainder of her book, providing a brief list of why sacred prostitution never existed in the first place: the institution was a literary construct, the lack of a direct native term for 'sacred prostitute' in ancient texts, and the influence of confirmation bias amongst scholars and ancient writers alike. Chapter 2 discusses evidence from the Near East, the supposed birthplace of sacred prostitution, by investigating the vocabulary utilized in the ancient languages of Akkadian, Sumerian, and Caanaanite. She demonstrates how terms typically associated with sacred prostitution do not, in fact, relate to prostitutes at all. Chapter 3 provides "a collection of the most commonly cited references to sacred prostitution in the Greco-Roman reportoire," while Chapters 4 through 9 analyze the aforementioned primary sources that contributed to the rise of the myth of sacred prostitution. Chapter 4 is a crucial chapter to Budin's book, as she frequently refers back to its contents throughout her book. In this section, she pinpoints Herodotus as the 'father' and primary perpetrator of sacred prostitution, as his description of Babylonian women in Histories 1.199 has "directly or indirectly" influenced other ancient writers like Strabo in perpetuating sacred prostitution. These Herodotean influences can be observed in Chapters 5, 6, and 7, as Budin deconstructs Lucian's De Dea Syria, Pindar's Fragment 122, and Strabo's multiple depictions of sacred prostituion in Babylonia and Corinth. Chapter 8 moves slightly away from the Herodotean influence, and focuses on the works produced by Roman authors Klearkhos, Justinus, and Valerius Maximus. In this chapter, Budin argues that evidence for sacred prostitutes has been found by "reading into the texts" and transforming depictions of revenge and rape into proof of sacred prostitution. While most of Budin's book is based upon textual evidence, she offers the reader a brief overview of the archaeological evidence from ancient Etruria in Chapter 9 to further explain the "gratuitous circular reasoning" scholars use when literary evidence is lacking. Chapter 10 discusses the rhetoric of early Christian authors, stating that sacred prostitution was a fictitious creation in order to accuse their opponents of egregiously lustful behaviors." Budin concludes her book in Chapter 11 by providing the reader with the historiography of sacred prostitution, demonstrating how Classicists dating as far back to the Victorian Era have errenously sustained the myth. In each chapter, Budin comes to the conclusion that ancient societies may have experienced prostitution or sacred religious rituals, but never concurrently. By the end of the book, the reader is left with an image of sacred prostitution that recalls a terrible game of whisper down the lane, where the final 'message' of sacred prostitution had been so radically altered as a result of eons of bad analysis and unattentive reading. There are many accomplishments worthy of note in Budin's monograph. One of them, as noted by Will Deming, is the fact that Budin's work is the first attempt to comprehensively "debunk" sacred prostitution as an ancient practice. Along similar lines, Lena-Sofia Tiemeyer notes the novelty of Budin's research as the monograph breaks away from traditional studies of sacred prostitution that centered on Mesopotamia exclusively. Thus, her initiative to begin holistic review of sacred prostitution and its proponents is one to be lauded. Also of novelty was Budin's humor, which complemented her firm determination to convey the foolishness of sacred prostitution: "The myth of sacred prostitution probably dates back to the fifth century BCE, when some fellow went home to tell his family what he heard from Herodotus today ("You won't believe what they do in Babylon…!")." In addition to her humor, Budin's consideration to detail, particularly to vocabulary and grammatical structure, as one of the greatest strengths of this monograph. In Chapter 7, she devotes twelve of fifty-seven pages to exploring the three various definitions of the word hierodule (translated as 'sacred slave') in ancient Egyptian and Anatolian contexts. Her careful analysis of terms historically associated with sacred prostitution makes it apparent that terms were taken out of context and misused by ancient writers and modern scholars alike, moving the actual existence of sacred prostitution into a very dubious category. For all of Budin's successes, there are a few shortcomings within her book. I will first begin with its composition. While the book contains a Dedication, Acknowledgements, Abbreviations, an Index, and Bibliography, there is no Appendix where the reader could obtain additional information on the author's sources. I suspect that Budin's target audience for this publication is well-knowledged classicists familiar with the idea of sacred prostitution and its main ancient advocates, not undergraduate students just becoming acquainted with the term. If trained scholars are indeed her primary audience, that would perhaps explain the lack of an Appendix. As an undergraduate student, however, I would have appreciated an Appendix where Budin could have provided the following information: a brief biography of each ancient writer that she included in her monograph; the limitations of each aforementioned author's works; and a series of maps depicting each geographical location that she discusses (Babylonia, Etruria, Corinth, Armenia, Pontic Comana, Egyptian Thebes, etc.). While Budin does discuss a few of the limitations of some ancient writers in the very chapters themselves' for instance, Budin devotes six pages of Chapter 4 to discussing Herodotus' role as a Greek historiographer and often reminds the reader in Chapter 7 that Strabo was a Corinthian writer and thus providing an outside perspective on Babylonia' I believe that this discussion would have been better suited in an Appendix so that Budin could present the issues of evidence more concretely. Second, there is the issue of Budin's own definition of sacred prostitution. Though Budin provides a definition of her own "for the sake of clarity," I doubt that many other contemporary scholars would automatically default to the definition that she coined' especially if this definition was used to bolster her own argument. Deming points out that Budin's definition is narrow and is therefore able to exclude texts that do not specifically mention payment, including instances where "temple personnel, if they offered patrons sex, may have received support from the temple for this." Many scholars like Deming, who likely have their own specific definition of sacred prostitution and what practices may fall beneath it, would be correct to question Budin's definition as it almost guarantees that there will be little evidence in antiquity to support sacred prostitution. Perhaps if Budin selected a definition that was more commonly used or agreed upon by a majority of Classicists, this issue of Budin's definition versus that of all other scholars and critics may have been averted. Discussion of how sacred prostitution has typically been defined by Classicists and how she arrived at her own definition of sacred prostitution for the purposes of her book would have been appropriate in an Appendix, had she decided to include one. All things considered, Budin's monograph is a large step forward in the study of sacred prostitution in antiquity. As sacred prostitution has been a long-debated topic within ancient studies, it is refreshing to see an analysis that compels readers to reimagine sacred prostitution, revisit the facts, and challenge previously-held conceptions. Much of her evidence and analysis of ancient writers does strongly suggest that mistakes were made by ancient writers and Classicists alike. I belief that if any issue is taken with her piece, it will be from scholars who question the accuracy of her claim that modern-day scholars are as much to blame for the perpetuation of sacred prostitution as Herodotus or Strabo. Rather than take offense to this claim, scholars should take this statement as an invitation to conduct further research of their own in rebuttal. Whether or not her conclusions are ones that scholars can concur upon, Budin's piece is one that will remain with scholars for quite some time.

Review # 2 was written on 2015-01-23 00:00:00 Philp Scolieri WHORES WHORES WHORES