The World's Oldest Porn?

In the remote province of Xinjiang in northern China there is a series of ancient rock carvings which may be the oldest depiction of sex ever discovered.

This post could easily have been made last month when I had archaeology as my Ology of the Month, but I thought I’d hold it back until now to tie in with my celebration of Asian-Pacific heritage. Archaeologically speaking, though, it seems that these carvings show the early influence of the west in China.

When the cave carvings, or petroglyphs, as archaeologists call this type of carving, were discovered in 1980 they were dated to about 3,000 years ago, but later research and comparisons to other carvings pushed the date back another thousands years to around 2000 BC. What they appear to show is some sort of fertility ritual or festival which shows a huge orgy.

In all 83 full figures are carved, with lots of headless torsos and floating heads (not thought to represent mutilation or death). Of the full figures 50 are female, 14 are male, and 19 are bisexual. To understand these numbers we must look at how the male and female genders are depicted. The differences are subtle but important. The drawing below shows the typical depictions in the carving for a woman (left) and a man (right).

 

The strange antenna on most of the women’s heads are representations of a ceremonial headdress associated with women of high status. Strangely, all of the figures have their arms in the same position. Perhaps this indicates some part of the ritual, or signifies the human connection between heaven and earth.

The figures described by archaeologists as bisexual appear to be sexually aroused men wearing female ceremonial headdresses or with female heads drawn on their chest. These have been identified as shamans and priests. The depiction of these shamans varies.

The culture which the carving represents, the one which carved it, may have been Eurasian in origin rather than east Asian. The area is near the mountainous region north of the dangerous Taklamakan Desert (it’s names means “you go in, but you won’t get out!”). It was an area where nomads from what is now Kazakhstan moved south along the mountains, like some Eurasian cultural finger poking into China!

With the area being so remote, and the current political situation, it is unlikely that any further such carvings will be found in the near future. It would be interesting to know exactly who these people were, how much ethnic mix went on with neighbouring Asian cultures, and how much this culture influenced northern China.

A scholarly article on the petroglyphs can be found here.