Did they really do it like that?
Sumerian erotic poetry wasn't fantasy
In an earlier post, I described the two models of sex that we see in ancient Sumerian literature: the lust-driven, male-centric model found in epic poetry, and the tender, unhurried, connection-driven model found in erotic poetry.
In that post, I assumed that what we see described in poetry was a faithful depiction of how Sumerians actually conducted themselves sexually. That depersonalized, urgent sex was what men got from a prostitute, but what they aspired to create in their own bedrooms matched the ecstatic songs of the erotic poetry tradition.
This is a really big assumption, given that, as far as I know, no existing culture has sexual norms that match what we find in Sumerian erotic poetry:
No intercourse, and nothing that looks like intercourse. No thrusting or rubbing any part of your body against your partner for your own pleasure. No taking or using.
Strict turn-taking. One partner is actively giving and the other passively receiving. The women receives first.
Always initiated by the woman.
Relaxed, unhurried, non-urgent.
Is it really plausible that they did things this way? What’s the evidence?
Can’t we just take them at their word?
If that’s how they described sex, why wouldn’t we assume that’s how they did it? It seems like an obvious case of cultural bias to say, “we know what sex looks like, and this isn’t it, so this can’t be real.”
That sort of bias is exactly what we see in the earliest scholarly discussions of Sumerian erotic poetry. Scholars took it for granted, for example, that intercourse was always happening, and was simply left “offstage” for some reason, even in passages that describe both partners reaching full satisfaction without intercourse. If a poem described non-intercourse-centric sex in an explicit and straightforward way, it would receive comments like, “the meaning of the last three lines, which seem to depict in some way the actual sex act, is obscure.”1
Of course, bias can operate in the other direction as well. And there are plenty of cases of people trying to read modern sensibilities into ancient texts in a way that isn’t faithful to the original text or culture. To be honest, that’s what I was originally trying to do when I first started looking at the Song of Songs. I was thinking of how to talk to my sons about sex, and specifically about the lessons I described in this post, and I thought the Song of Songs would provide a picture of healthy sex I could use as a jumping-off point. I thought I had already walked to the end of that road, and I was startled when the Song of Songs asked me to go even further. And I was very resistant at first to all the constraints the Sumerians put on sex, which just seemed unnecessary and weird. It was only when I asked a sexologist “why the heck would they do it this way?” that I started to understand there was a coherent purpose behind it.
So how can we be sure what the intended meaning of the text is, without any bias introduced by our modern perspective? We can’t. There are probably some statements we can never really substantiate. We can’t, for example, say for sure that the reason sex looks different in Sumerian erotic poetry is that men desired connection, or thought the pursuit of hotness was the behavior of uncivilized savages. But we can accept that they actually did what they said they did. And all scholars of these poems, even those who take it for granted that male-centric, intercourse-centric sexuality is what “real sex” looks like, agree that what they say they did in Sumerian erotic poetry is very different from our norm.
We should also note that this isn’t just one poem. The Song of Songs stands at the end of a tradition that was, by then, 2500 years old, having lasted through three major civilizations. Ancient Mesopotamians wrote and performed songs about this style of sex for thousands of years. In fact, some of the original Sumerian songs were still popular thousands of years later, as evidenced by their inclusion in lists of songs from the Akkadian era.
Now, that doesn’t mean they always or even normally did sex this way. We could be seeing a stylized or ritualistic form of sex, not the “real thing.” Jerrold S. Cooper suggests2 that these songs may have been an ancient equivalent of romance novels — designed primarily to appeal to women, and presenting a fanciful picture of sex that abstracts away the parts less likely to appeal to women. But as I noted before, many of these poems are about kings — definitely alpha males — who were proud to be depicted having sex in this manner. That doesn’t sound like women’s fantasy.
It works
There is another good reason to believe this wasn’t fantasy: it works.
An ancient Assyrian cake recipe involves no baking soda, no refined sugar — none of what we take for granted as the usual components of cake. But does that mean this recipe is a fantasy that never existed? That’s an easy question to answer: we can just follow the recipe. If it yields a delicious treat, that’s pretty good evidence that whoever wrote the recipe knew what they were talking about.
The points above that describe Sumerian turn-taking-sex are also exactly the recipe given for explosively great sex by Emily Nagoski in Come as You Are (probably the best known modern book about sex). These aren’t arbitrary decisions about sexual norms, or even a set of disconnected principles for more mutual sex. There is a coherent strategy behind all of them, aiming at a particular goal — freeing sex from the compulsive service of our reproductive instincts so that it can be harnessed to feed our bonding instincts. And so that those reproductive instincts don’t ruin it by driving us through sex too quickly to fully enjoy it.
In other words, when we follow Dumuzi and Inana’s recipe, we end up with some really good cake. And that forces us to admit that they knew something about baking.
How did they talk about it?
But again, we could still ask: is this a recipe for what normal sex looked like, or an ideal that many aspired to but few attained?
If we want to figure out how sex was normally practiced, we are lucky to have a number of examples from outside love poetry that show how sex was described.
When we start mining the wide variety of ancient Mesopotamian writings for such references, we find them in some unexpected places. For example: the Assyrians believed that wet dreams were caused by ghosts of young people who had reached the age of puberty but then died before they had a chance to experience a full adult sexual life.3 So we can look in at that tradition for examples of how a sexually inexperienced man or woman was described:
A lad who married no wife, who raised no child, A lad who has never felt sensuality in his wife’s lap, A lad who has never stripped off the/(his) clothes in his wife’s lap, A lad who was expelled from his wedding chamber, […] A maiden who has never had intercourse like a woman, […] A maiden who has never felt sensuality in her husband’s lap, A maiden who never stripped off her clothes in her husband’s lap, A maiden whose (garment-)pin no handsome lad has loosened, […] A maiden who never had her fill of sensuality nor satisfied her desire in a lad’s lap, […] A maiden who never had fun with the (other) maidens, […] A maiden who had no husband, has raised no child, […] A maiden who was expelled from her marriage chamber.
If this is what it means to be deprived of experiencing a normal adult sex life, then it’s interesting how broad a range of experiences that covers. Marriage, raising children, being naked together — all these are included, not just our culture’s simple binary of having “done it” or not.
Jerrold S. Cooper notes the oddity that, for a man, having had intercourse isn’t even part of the definition. He suggests that simply having intercourse — for example, with the prostitutes who are well attested in Assyrian sources — may have been so normal an exploration for pubescent males that it didn’t even count as the real thing.
And note how the “real thing” is described: “A lad/maiden who has never felt sensuality in his wife’s/her husband’s lap.” This is describing the sex position you can see depicted in my earlier post, where one partner, lying on their back and held in the other partner’s embrace, passively receives pleasure from them.
We should also note that exactly equivalent phrases are used to describe what sex is like for both men and women. Intercourse-centric sex has defined roles and, in ancient culture as well as modern, often carries connotations of a dominant partner and a submissive one. Giving-receiving sex has no defined gender roles (unless we count the fact that the woman typically gets to receive first). This reflects an unusual trait of gender in ancient Mesopotamian society: as scholar Jana Matuszak notes,4 we see there gendered professions but universal, ungendered behavioral norms:
By defining appropriate occupational profiles for men and women, respectively, the texts advocate for a sexual division of labor, which prepared men for public roles and consigned women to private spaces. […] But precisely against the backdrop of the binary division into educated scribes and resourceful housewives, the universality of social norms and values remains remarkable: according to the texts, they applied to men and women alike, without any trace of gradation.
Jerrold S. Cooper also offers one more example of how “normal” sex is described. There is, he notes,5 only one mention of a “wedding night” situation in ancient Sumerian and Assyrian texts, a proverb apparently so well known that it is found in both languages:
Something that has never occurred since time immemorial: A nubile girl was never (before) flatulent in her husband’s lap!
This makes it pretty clear that caressing-in-the-lap sex, not intercourse, was what people assumed would happen on the wedding night. The flatulence is presumably brought on by the muscular contractions that accompany orgasm. So, it was also taken for granted that the wife would have an orgasm on her wedding night — something that is relatively rare when wedding night sex is intercourse.6
Omens
There is also one more ancient source that is particularly illuminating because it provides not just a broad description of “normal” sex, but some indication of the moral valence of specific actions during sex.
The šumma ālu is an Assyrian compendium of omens. It lists various things someone might observe — odd behavior of animals, for example — and gives an interpretation, auspicious or inauspicious, for each one.
Two of the tablets in this compendium deal with sex. Tablet 103 deals specifically with intercourse, in different locations and positions. Tablet 104 does not use the word for intercourse, instead addressing cases where a man “comes near” a woman or a man and woman are “facing each other”. Tablet 103 exists only in one fragmentary copy. Tablet 104 was apparently vastly more popular, with many copies extant. And it seems to assume turn-taking sex. Many of the omens turn on the question of who is “facing” who when something happens:7
If, when a man is facing his woman, she handles her vagina, that man is not pure; for the rest of (his) days his hand will tremble.
If he is in the “giving” position and she feels the need to help things along, this implies he is a catastrophically bad lover.
The detailed nature of the “omens” allows us to draw some conclusions about other cultural attitudes related to sex. For example, consider obligation sex, the viewpoint that wives have an obligation to “give” sex to their husbands on demand.
Many leaders in the American Evangelical church take the appalling position that a wife is obligated to perform any sex act her husband might want, any time he wants it. Others suggest that she can, instead, “accommodate” him in some other way instead — say, with a handjob — while still insisting that she is obligated to give him “release” in some way whenever he “needs” it. Healthier voices in the church, of course, agree with the Song of Songs (see my earlier post) that wives have no such obligation. If a man really desperately wants an orgasm, they say, then he should just have an orgasm. That’s why God gave him hands.
Where did the Assyrians fall on this question?
If a man causes a woman to repeatedly take hold of his penis, he is not pure; the god will not accept his prayer.
If a man talks with a woman on a bed and then he rises from the bed and makes manhood [i.e. masturbates], that man will have happiness and jubilation bestowed upon him; wherever he goes all will be agreeable; he will always achieve goal.
This latter omen, as Ann Guinan notes,8 is not simply auspicious, but superlatively so:
The omen makes the sexual context clear and evidently coitus does not take place. […] He relinquishes the woman and achieves satisfaction on his own. [This] is the most auspicious omen of either Tablet 103 or 104. In texts that are more concerned with the balances of profit and loss and the possibility of affliction, the prediction goes beyond happiness to exhilaration and beyond success to triumph.
In other words, the most auspicious thing a man can do sexually, in this text, is to engage in non-erotic intimate contact with his wife — snuggling and talking in bed — while understanding that if this leaves him aroused and wishing things had gone further, that’s his problem and not something she needs to “accommodate.”
It’s not clear-cut
Based on all this, it seems reasonable to assume that the sort of sex that ancient Mesopotamians liked to sing about was also the same sort of sex they liked to practice in the bedroom.
Now, that doesn’t mean that they never felt driven by lust. We know, for example, that there were laws against rape, which suggests rape did occur. And people who aspire to connection-centric sex might still feel drawn to a quick orgasm — one facilitated by the “make that happen right now” instinct of hotness — when they were having a rotten day. As well as masturbation, prostitution existed from the very earliest times, and we can assume that men who were feeling lonely or stressed “took some comfort there”, in the words of Paul Simon.
In the later Babylonian period — drawing closer to the time of the Song of Songs — there is also evidence that a subset of men saw Dumuzi-style sex as weak and effeminate. “Stop reading all that Sumerian love poetry,” one father urges his son. “Learn some useful language instead, like Amorite!” He then goes on to extol the virtues of life on the battlefield as the locus of real masculinity — not hanging around at home with a lot of women.9
There’s also at least one song from the later period where a man rejects his former lover because he has met a new woman who introduced him to the pleasures of taking-and-using sex, and now he only wants more of the same:
I will not change for you a word, anything I said. He who lies on his back for a woman is a weevil from the city wall. If he is not serious he is no match for a man.
His language is so over-the-top as to be almost certainly a caricature — an ancient equivalent of the pick-up artist, viewed with fascination and disgust by those who want sex to be relational. But the existence of such a caricature implies there were men like this around to be caricatured:
I despise the girl who does not wo[rship (me)]. I do not desire for the girl who does not [fawn].
Of course, since this is a love poem, love (Dumuzi-style) wins out in the end, and he ends up recognizing not only the desirability, but also the wisdom, of his first partner:
My one, not ugly are your features – (they are) as before, (When) I stood by you, And you leaned your sh[oulders] (against me). [Mag]irtum (“Favorable”) is your name, “Wise la[dy]” – your title. The other woman is indeed our misfortune.
It seems like the most responsible conclusion we can draw, especially if we were looking at the time period of the Song of Songs, is that the giving-and-receiving mode of sex was fairly widely aspired to, but not universally practiced, and that a subculture existed that glorified taking-and-using sex as the mark of a “real man.”
I’ve skipped over one other area that is worth looking at: How was sex depicted in ancient Mesopotamia? I’ve left that for another post because the answer turned out to be more interesting than I expected, and it made me reconsider whether some of the constraints I listed at the start of this post were actually observed at the time of the Song of Songs.
Samuel Noah Kramer, The Sacred Marriage Rite, note 14 from p. 93. The text reads, “Your place as sweet as honey, pray lay a hand on it. Like a gishban-garment, bring your hand over it. Like a gishban-sikin-garment, cup your hand over it.” The triple repetition and the placement in the song makes it clear this is the culmination of the sexual encounter. If Kramer had read Shere Hite, he would know that diffuse pressure on the vulva is one of the top three methods of reaching orgasm preferred by women. Intercourse doesn’t even make the list.
See Jerrold S. Cooper, Virginity in ancient Mesopotamia (2002). “The ghosts of young women and men who died before they had experienced sexual fulfillment and/or family life were among the malevolent spirits to be warded off or exorcized.”
Also from Virginity in ancient Mesopotamia.
Sheila Wray Gregoire has studied and written about this extensively.
All these quotes are from Ann Guinan, Auguries of Hegemony: The Sex Omens of Mesopotamia. My interpretations differ from hers because I find that assuming giving-and-receiving sex explains details of the wording that are otherwise obscure. If you want to draw your own conclusions, full translations of both tablets can be found here and here.
From the same paper.
See Jerrold S. Cooper, Female Trouble and Troubled Males. In the same paper is another case of a man extolling the virtues of the battlefield life who boasts that they “eat raw meat” on campaign. Recall from this this earlier post that eating uncooked food was the mark of an uncivilized savage and an Enkidu-style lover.