A Different World

Every day is a festival in Uruk,

with people singing and dancing in the streets,

musicians playing their lyres and drums,

the lovely priestesses standing before

the temple of Istar, chatting and laughing,

flushed with sexual joy, and ready,

to serve men's pleasure, in honor of the goddess,

so that even old men are aroused from their beds.

- Gilgamesh

Ha, ha... wow... a completely different kind of people.  It's hard to imagine that we are (at least distantly) related to them.

"It wasn't all-work-no-play back then.  Mesopotamians, we know, were party people."

- Don't Know Much About Mythology

If you don't recognize "Uruk", it's identified as the same city as "Erech" in the Bible, if that's of any use.  If my memory serves me, the Christians didn't like it too well.  They didn't exactly have a lot of morals, especially about sex, back in that culture.

If I remember correctly, in the Enuma Elish there's one verse that says, "No girl is a woman until she has gone to the temple and slept with a stranger".  Or something like that in its own Mesopotamian style.

Girls will like this though; in many cultures, such as this one, the women were worshipped for their creative powers.  But then came the Catholic Church (they had to squash the fun out of everything, didn't they?  =]  Jk...) and because of Eve's original sin and since Christ was male brought along the extremely patriarchal religion like none the world had seen before.  Men kind of turned the tables on women, because now the modern world's two largest religions (Christianity and Islam) are very masculine-oriented.  Who knows, in a few thousand years, the women might get the upside again!  =)

I can assure you, all the sexual puns in the latter paragraph were completely unintentional!  =)

Mesopotamian "Ram in a Thicket" -

Ishtar Gate in Babylon -

Gold, Persian armlet -

A random picture of Queen Hazel Marie - =)

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