I was 12 years old when Archaeology first gripped and terrified me. It was the moment when the high priest of Amun, George Zukor in his fez and blazer, incanted the spell which enabled 3000-year-old Boris Karloff to push the lid off his sarcophagus and stagger away to throttle anyone wearing an archaeologist’s uniform. From then on, any book featuring mummies was on my syllabus.
I didn’t end up as an Egyptologist because everything on Sherlock Holmes, Wilson the Wonder Runner and War was also required reading, but I fancied myself as having a fair knowledge of Pharaohs. What a tremendous let down however when, decades later, my daughter, Sylvia, after taking tourists around the treasures of Egypt, told me about some of the more unusual practices in which the Kings indulged!
How was it that I didn’t know that Seti masturbated for purposes other than fun? Gradually it seeped through to me that this fact and many others had been suppressed because, in the estimation of the great archaeologists, decent folk were not ready, and never would be, for such indecent revelations.
It was the old hypocrisy of censorship by prudery: fine for the wall-painting to show a Warrior King collecting mountains of foreskins from the fallen enemy, but absolutely forbidden to allow him to be seen exercising his own! I then began to speculate on what else had been locked away about prehistoric man, Egypt, the Maya, the Greeks, Romans and Chinese, etc; so I did a little probing, but the secrets were so well kept that only a professional would know where to dig. I called Paul Bahn, and this book was born.
Bill Tidy
At Khajuraho, India, the explicitly erotic subjects are presented with a liveliness and delicacy that deeply shocked the English colonial archaeologists who excavated the site in the early twentieth century. Guidebooks at that time discouraged visitors to the site for fear of impropriety and moral corruption,