Herodotus describes it fully: women with cord crowns seated in the precinct, roped lanes for the men to pass and choose, the required phrase I invite you in the name of Mylitta, the coin made sacred, the woman forbidden to refuse, and the sting: the tall and fair leave quickly, the plain wait three or four years. Strabo repeats the account with expressed doubt, the Letter of Jeremiah echoes it, and two thousand years of dictionaries and tour books promoted it to Babylonian fact.
The passage became the foundation stone of the whole idea of sacred prostitution: from it, generations of scholars inferred temple brothels across the ancient world, reading erotic plaques, priestess titles, and wedding rites as corroboration. The concept grew so load-bearing that entire religions were described as organized around it, on the strength of one Greek paragraph.
Stephanie Budin's The Myth of Sacred Prostitution in Antiquity (2008), building on Daniel Arnaud and Julia Assante: sacred prostitution never existed in the ancient Near East; the Mylitta passage reads as an inversion of Greek women's ritual, constructed to barbarize the defeated East, and Strabo's hierodoulos means temple slave, not prostitute. Critics counter that Budin leans heavily on Assante and that the Akkadian dictionaries still list barimtu as prostitute, but the core finding holds: the evidence is literary, late, and foreign, while the local archive is silent.
Why did history's most documentary civilization leave no document of its most famous alleged custom?