Recently some scholars, such as
Robert A. Oden, Stephanie Lynn Budin and others, have questioned whether sacred prostitution, as an institution whereby women and men sold sex for the profit of deities and temples, did in fact ever actually exist at all. J
ulia Assante believes that the classical view of temple prostitution is more of a construct of the 19th-century Western European mindset than a true representation of the facts. While there may well have been some religious prostitution centred around the temples of
Inanna/
Ishtar, Assante suggests that the concept of the 'Sacred Marriage'
hieros gamos has in fact been misunderstood. It was previously believed to have been a custom whereby the king coupled with the high priestess to represent the union of
Dumuzid with
Inanna (later called
Ishtar). It's much more likely that these unions never occurred, but were embellishments to the image of the king; hymns which praise Middle Eastern kings for coupling with the goddess
Ishtar often also speak of him as running 320 kilometres, offering sacrifices, feasting with the sun-god
Utu, and receiving a royal crown from
An, all in a single day. One scholar comments: "No one, to the best of my knowledge, has been so wooden-minded to propose that human actors played the role of Utu and An at the banquet". Not all authors are convinced, however.
