[133] Herodotus, Bk.  I, Ch.  CXCIX; Baruch, Ch.  VI, p. 43.  Modern scholars confirm the statements of Herodotus from the study of Babylonian literature, though inclined to deny that religious prostitution occupied so large a place as he gives it.  A tablet of the Gilgamash epic, according to Morris Jastrow, refers to prostitutes as attendants of the goddess Ishtar in the city Uruk (or Erech), which was thus a centre, and perhaps the chief centre, of the rites described by Herodotus (Morris Jastrow, The Religion of Babylonia and Assyria, 1898, p. 475).  Ishtar was the goddess of fertility, the great mother goddess, and the prostitutes were priestesses, attached to her worship, who took part in ceremonies intended to symbolize fertility.  These priestesses of Ishtar were known by the general name Kadishtu, “the holy ones” (op. cit., pp. 485, 660).

[134] It is usual among modern writers to associate Aphrodite Pandemos, rather than Ourania, with venal or promiscuous sexuality, but this is a complete mistake, for the Aphrodite Pandemos was purely political and had no sexual significance.  The mistake was introduced, perhaps intentionally, by Plato.  It has been suggested that that arch-juggler, who disliked democratic ideas, purposely sought to pervert and vulgarize the conception of Aphrodite Pandemos (Farnell, Cults of Greek States, vol. ii, p. 660).

[135] Athenaeus, Bk. xiii, cap.  XXXII.  It appears that the only other Hellenic community where the temple cult involved unchastity was a city of the Locri Epizephyrii (Farnell, op. cit., vol. ii, p. 636).

[136] I do not say an earlier “promiscuity,” for the theory of a primitive sexual promiscuity is now widely discredited, though there can be no reasonable doubt that the early prevalence of mother-right was more favorable to the sexual freedom of women than the later patriarchal system.  Thus in very early Egyptian days a woman could give her favors to any man she chose by sending him her garment, even if she were married.  In time the growth of the rights of men led to this being regarded as criminal, but the priestesses of Amen retained the privilege to the last, as being under divine protection (Flinders Petrie, Egyptian Tales, pp. 10, 48).

[137] It should be added that Farnell ("The Position of Women in Ancient Religion,” Archiv fuer Religionswissenschaft, 1904, p. 88) seeks to explain the religious prostitution of Babylonia as a special religious modification of the custom of destroying virginity before marriage in order to safeguard the husband from the mystic dangers of defloration.  E.S.  Hartland, also ("Concerning the Rite at the Temple of Mylitta,” Anthropological Essays Presented to E.B.  Tyler, p. 189), suggests that this was a puberty rite connected with ceremonial defloration.  This theory is not, however, generally accepted by Semitic scholars.

[138] The girls of this tribe, who are remarkably pretty, after spending two or three years in thus amassing a little dowry, return home to marry, and are said to make model wives and mothers.  They are described by Bertherand in Parent-Duchatelet, La Prostitution a Paris, vol. ii, p. 539.