Disgraceful Archaeology (5 page)

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In the entrance hall of a Pompeii brothel is a painting of a man holding a double penis, maybe one for action and one for luck. Pompeii had 12,000 inhabitants and 34 brothels. One Roman word for a prostitute was ‘Nonaria’ — ninth hour — which, as they counted time from dawn, meant 4 pm, the time when brothels opened. One painting of sex in a Pompeii brothel has ‘
Lente Impelle
’ written above it, ‘Push Slowly’ (
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).

According to Herodotus, the Greek historian of the fifth century BC, the women of ancient Egypt were all unfaithful. When a son of Ramesses II had been blind for 10 years, an oracle from the city of Buto declared to him that the time of his punishment was drawing to an end, and that he should regain his sight by washing his eyes with the menses of a woman who had never had intercourse with any man but her own husband. Pheros made a trial with his own wife first, but still remained blind, even though he tried with all women, one after the other. When he finally recovered his sight, he took all the women whom he had tried, gathered them in one town, and burnt them and the town — but he married the woman by whose means he had recovered sight.

In a Mesopotamian Cuneiform wedding contract testimony, arguing about the return of the house as part of the dowry, Iddin-aba backs out, saying ‘Your daughter I shall not marry. Tie her up and throw her in the river’ (a reference to the river trial of truth-telling).

An Egyptian papyrus in the British Museum, ‘The Instruction of Ankhsheshonq’, contains rules written by a priest for his youngest son — including the following:

Hesiod, a Greek poet of the eighth century BC, was very anti-women, seeing them as a necessity but an economic liability with vices: ‘Do not let a woman with a sexy rump deceive you with wheedling and coaxing words; she is after your barn. The man who trusts a woman trusts deceivers.’

Semonides, a poet-philosopher of the seventh century BC, compared women to different creatures: (
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)

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There are even traces of prehistoric violence to women. A prehistoric skeleton from South Africa, dating to within the last 2000 years, is that of an adult woman who was shot at close range by two arrows in the back. And the oldest evidence of interhuman violence, recently published, is the skeleton of an adult female from the late Ice Age with an arrowhead in her pelvis — and she was in Sicily! Perhaps a horse’s skull was found with her .…

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From the sixteenth century, chroniclers like Cieza and others refer to clear cases of zoophilia as practised by the natives of Peru the habit of copulating with llamas seems to have been a widespread habit among the natives of the Andes. Early in the twentieth century there were pottery pieces, representing cases of coupling with llamas, in museums and collections in Lima, but they were destroyed by ‘cultured’ persons’ due to a mistaken patriotism, in an effort to erase proofs that showed the presence of a practice considered abominable.’ They have been systematically destroyed (
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). The Incas were said to have collected pornographic Moche pottery.

Herodotus was shocked by the sexual relations between men and animals in Egypt — he says a woman had open intercourse with a he-goat; this was probably a ritual act, as when the virility of the Apis bull was strengthened by women showing their privates to it.

In the dream books, there are various combinations of animals and people — men may copulate with jerboas, swallows and pigs, while women have a choice between mouse, horse, donkey, ram, wolf, lion, crocodile, snake, baboon, ibis or falcon. One Egyptian curse was ‘May a donkey copulate with your wife and children’.

According to Meleagros, ‘female eros’ now finds favour with him, and ‘the squeeze of a hairy arse’ he leaves to ‘herdsmen who mount their goats’.

In the Graeco-Roman world, ‘Satyrs’ were ugly, earthy, drunken creatures; they masturbated constantly if no living being with a suitable orifice was available, but they preferred mules, horses or deer and even the neck of a jar might be pressed into service. One Greek vase shows a satyr about to mount an unsuspecting sphinx from the rear!

In the Roman games and shows, sexual relations between a woman and an animal were often exhibited ‘under the stands’, and occasionally in the arena, but the trouble was in finding an animal that would perform on schedule. A jackass or even a large dog that would voluntarily mount a woman before a screaming mob was rare, and of course the woman was forced to cooperate — a willing woman destroyed most of the crowd’s fun. With a bull or giraffe, the victim usually didn’t survive the ordeal; they would use old women from the provinces who didn’t fully realize what the job entailed until it was too late.

Apuleius, a Roman writer of the second century AD, tells of one woman who had poisoned five people to get their property; she was sentenced to be thrown to the wild beasts in the arena, but first, as additional punishment and disgrace, she was to be raped by a jackass. A bed was set up in the middle of the arena, inlaid with tortoise shell and provided with a feather mattress and an embroidered Chinese bedspread. She was tied spread-eagled on the bed. The jackass had been trained to kneel on the bed, otherwise the business could not have been concluded successfully. When the show was over, wild beasts were turned loose in the arena and quickly put an end to the wretched woman’s suffering.

Apuleius also tells of a wealthy noblewoman who asked a trainer to bring one of his trained jackasses to her room at night, promising him a fabulous sum of money. She made elaborate preparations — four eunuchs placed a feather bed on the floor, with soft pillows at one end. She ordered the trainer to lead the jackass to the bed, get him to lie down, and then she rubbed him with oil of balsam. Then the trainer was told to leave and return the next morning. She demanded the jackass’s services so often that the trainer was afraid she might kill herself, but after a few weeks his only concern was that she might totally exhaust the valuable animal.

Mythology saw some hybrid monsters as the product of a union between a mortal woman and an animal, as in the famous story of Pasiphaë, the wife of Minos king of Crete, who became enamoured of a bull. In lovesick despair at her failure to achieve congress with the object of her passion, Pasiphaë sought the
help of the famed craftsman Daidalus, who manufactured a marvellously lifelike heifer, inside which the queen then hid. The unholy coupling took place, in consequence of which Pasiphaë gave birth to the Minotaur…… (
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)

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The first discoveries of rock art in the Sahara were made in 1847 by two soldiers (Dr François Félix Jacquot and Captain Kook of the Foreign Legion), part of General Cavaignac’s expedition against the Ksour tribes. Jacquot published two engravings of rock figures (‘a family out hunting’ and ‘a warrior’s lesson to his son’) but noted that others were of appalling indecency which would prevent them ever emerging from his files (
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):