Sacred prostitution never existed in the ancient near east or Mediterranean. This book presents the evidence that leads to that conclusion. It also reconsiders the various literary data that have given rise to the sacred prostitution myth and offers new interpretations of what these may have actually meant in their ancient contexts. I hope that this will end a debate that has been present in various fields of academia for about three decades now.

What is sacred prostitution, also known as cult, cultic, ritual, or temple prostitution? There are, as one might imagine of a topic that has been the object of study for centuries and the object of debate for decades, a number of different answers to that question. If we were to approach the topic from a classics perspective, we might come across the definition in the second edition of the Oxford Classical Dictionary, where sacred prostitution