Throughout the ages, different cultures have had vastly different sexual practices, ranging from mundane to bizarre. Like culture itself, sexuality is more than just a means of procreation; it is an expression of the dominant ideas of the time and can tell us a lot about what’s floating around in the collective zeitgeist of a particular society and ourselves as a species. So it goes without saying that if we peer into the sexual lives of the distant past, we find hints of ourselves, no matter how different they may have been in their expression of this fundamentally universal human activity.

Babylon (or Babylonia) was one of the first civilizations in existence, a region of settlements that is believed to have been initially established around 4000 BC. Famous for the Code of Hammurabi, Babylon was a society rich with culture, including a detailed writing system, accounting with mathematics, a diverse cuisine, and, of course, sex, with even the wild and lusty Greeks viewing the Babylonians as a sex-obsessed culture. Here is a glimpse into the world of Babylon, told through the lens of ten facts about sex in the ancient civilization.