If prostitution is the oldest profession, then the brothel must be the oldest public institution. The Government's plan to make brothels legal - albeit only small ones, with a maximum of two prostitutes and a receptionist - may sound bold to those in Middle England who fear the woman next door may turn to a bit of home working.
But the debate on whether prostitutes are best confined to brothels or allowed to walk the streets is hardly a new one. The "oldest profession" tag is, of course, almost certainly wrong. Not just because, as some feminists have pointed out, it is probably the profession of midwife that qualifies for the label.
Anthropologists suggest prostitution did not actually seem to exist at all in what were once called primitive societies. There was no sex for sale among the Aborigines of Australia before the white man arrived. Nor, apparently, were there brothels in societies ranging from the ancient Cymri people in Wales to recently discovered tribes in the jungles of Burma.
Prostitution seems to be something to do with what we call civilisation. The first recorded instances of women selling themselves for sex seem to be not in brothels but in temples.
In Sumaria, Babylonia and among the Phoenicians, prostitutes were those who had sex, not for gain, but as a religious ritual. Sex in the temple was supposed to confer special blessings on men and women alike. But that was very different to just doing it for money. There's plenty of that in the Bible, though prostitutes in the Jewish scriptures seemed to ply their trade from home, such as Rahab, the prostitute in Jericho who aided the spies of Joshua and identified her house with a scarlet rope - the origin, some say, of the "red light" though that may, more prosaically, come from the red lanterns carried by railroad workers left outside brothels while they were inside.
