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We continue to receive a deluge of letters—pro and con—about the ancient Egyptian pornography we published in our September/October 2001 issue (David O’Connor, “Eros in Egypt,” AO 04:05). One school teacher from Texas wrote us that she used the issue in her ninth- and tenth-grade classes, but tore out the offending pages that she found inappropriate for her students. If I were that school teacher, I think I would too.
On the other hand, a 14-year-old girl (probably in ninth or tenth grade), also from Texas, wrote us that she wants to be an Egyptologist someday and doesn’t understand why people are so upset by the Turin Erotic Papyrus (see The Forum, AO 05:01). After all, she wrote, our readers want “to know about ancient life.”
I do think there is an issue here. There are some things that are inappropriate for young people. There are even things that are inappropriate for cultivated, adult magazine readers. We don’t print dirty words, for example, even though we all know them.
About ancient pornography, however, there is little question. We cannot limit ourselves to what is appropriate for children. On the other hand, there is nothing wrong with deleting parts of the magazine that are inappropriate for children when using the magazine to involve children in archaeology. There are larger analogies that light the way for us: The Supreme Court’s standard of what constitutes pornography is not what would be appropriate for children; it is largely up to parents to screen inappropriate material from children. In the same way, parents can limit what appears on their own TV.
What is appropriate for children, or teenagers, is another question. I was charmed by the 14-year-old from Texas who wrote us with such aplomb on the subject. Yet the teacher found the images inappropriate. Maybe the material is inappropriate when used in the classroom but okay for individual student use.
The problem comes up in many guises, both in our magazines and in society in general. In a previous perspective on ancient porn in this space (November/December 2001), managing editor Jack Meinhardt mentioned some Roman oil lamps from excavations at Ashkelon in Israel that featured couples copulating. We had published the lamps in our sister magazine Biblical Archaeology Review (Lawrence E. Stager, “Eroticism and Infanticide at Ashkelon,” BAR 17:04). We solved the problem there, however, by printing the pictures on an outside column with an ad on the back, so that the offending images could be cut out with a minimum of damage to the magazine.
There are other issues of appropriateness, but none seems to raise the hackles like sex. We have no hesitation in publishing reliefs of ancient Israelites being impaled on sharp poles or being skinned alive by victorious Assyrians (see William Shea, “Jerusalem Under Siege,” BAR 25:06).
We heard nary a peep when we published a picture of a leopard chewing up the face of a helpless prisoner in a Roman mosaic from Tunisia or of the Christian martyr St. Sebastian tied to a post and pierced by Roman arrows (Donald G. Kyle, “No Guts, No Glory: Inside the Roman Arena,” AO 03:01).
In another of our sister magazines, Bible Review, we published images from an illustrated anti-Semitic Bible in which a Jew is pictured kissing a cat’s anus (Sara Lipton, “The Un-Moralized Bible,” BR 17:02). And there 056seems to be nothing wrong with printing pictures of Judith with Holofernes’s bloody, decapitated head in her hands—not an uncommon scene in Western art.
We are working on a piece for Biblical Archaeology Review on a Roman-period latrine found in Jerusalem, which requires us to consider how people at that time cleansed themselves after defecation. But none of this presents the problem that sexual images do. In another piece we are working on for this magazine, we are trying to explain a curious paradox: In the Late Bronze Age and Iron Age in the eastern Mediterranean and Mesopotamia, archaeologists have uncovered a host of what might be considered vulgar representations of women, often with exaggerated pubic triangles. Men, however, are almost never portrayed with exposed penises. In contrast, the Romans at Pompeii picture only what we would consider vulgar pictures of males with exaggerated penises. The Roman images of women, although often erotic, are seldom explicitly exposed or vulgar. Why the difference? The article will explore the reasons for this curious difference and again require us to return to the matter of sex. This touches a nerve like no other.
What it comes down to is that our magazines will continue to cover ancient life in all its aspects, all the while recognizing that some readers may understandably delete some of this material in particular circumstances. But we cannot and will not reduce the level of our magazines to some lowest common denominator.
We continue to receive a deluge of letters—pro and con—about the ancient Egyptian pornography we published in our September/October 2001 issue (David O’Connor, “Eros in Egypt,” AO 04:05). One school teacher from Texas wrote us that she used the issue in her ninth- and tenth-grade classes, but tore out the offending pages that she found inappropriate for her students. If I were that school teacher, I think I would too. On the other hand, a 14-year-old girl (probably in ninth or tenth grade), also from Texas, wrote us that she wants to be an Egyptologist someday and doesn’t understand […]
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