A History of Sex as a Business 01 | In the Beginning: Sex, Temples, and the First Economies

Before there were laws against it, before there was shame around it, before there were industries built to exploit it — there was the ancient world, and it had its own complicated relationship with sex as a transaction. This episode travels back to the earliest human settlements we know of, examines the archaeological and textual evidence for commercial sex in Mesopotamia, Egypt, and the ancient Near East, and takes on one of history's great controversies: did sacred prostitution actually exist? And what does the answer tell us about how we've always understood the relationship between bodies, money, and power?