The first dildo in history? What we can actually say

It is often said that a stone object, nearly thirty thousand years old, is “the world’s first dildo”. The idea is spectacular. It is also too neat for what the sources allow us to claim. The oldest phallic objects that archaeology has recovered do exist. Their use, however, remains debated. To find a dildo clearly named, and clearly described as an object of pleasure, one has to wait for Greek texts, much later in date.

A stone from Hohle Fels, and an overly hasty interpretation

In 2005, Nicholas Conard’s team, at the University of Tübingen, reconstructs a siltstone object from fourteen fragments found in the Hohle Fels cave, near Schelklingen, in the Swabian Jura. The report published the same year by World Archaeology gives its dimensions: 19.2 cm long, 3.6 cm wide and 2.8 cm thick. The stone was polished at length, then incised. Several radiocarbon measurements of the archaeological layer indicate a date of 29,000 BCE, that is, the Gravettian. In popular accounts, the object is often presented as being “28,000 years old”.

Its elongated shape is not natural. One of the ends bears several deeply carved rings. For Conard and his colleagues, it is a symbolic representation of the male organs, all the more remarkable in that the art of this period is known above all for its female figures. But the object is not only an image. Traces of wear show that it also served as a hammerstone, for working other stones. In the Palaeolithic, the archaeologists recall, a figured object is often also a tool.

It is this double nature that invites caution. Nothing in the 2005 report demonstrates a sexual use. The hypothesis has circulated, and it is not absurd. It remains an interpretation, among others. To make of it “the first dildo in history” goes further than what the stone allows us to say.

When the text, at last, names the object

To hear a dildo spoken of without ambiguity, one must leave prehistory and open a comedy. In 411 BCE, Aristophanes has Lysistrata performed. The women of Athens, Sparta and their allies refuse sexual relations to their husbands, in order to force them to negotiate peace. At the beginning of the play, Lysistrata mentions leather olisboi as a possible substitute in the absence of the men, and links their unavailability to the defection of Miletus, an ally of Athens until 412. The text attests that the theatre audience knew this object and its use. It is not enough, however, to make of Miletus a documented centre of manufacture: it is a joke in a comedy, not a craftsman’s inventory.

The word is clear, and so is the context. We do not, for all that, hold “the first dildo”: we hold the oldest literary mention, in the Greek world, that can still be read today and interpreted without acrobatics. A text is not an object preserved in the ground. It proves that in the fifth century BCE, in Athens, this object had a name, a material — here, leather — and a use that the theatre audience could understand.

Between a Gravettian pebble of uncertain role and an Attic comedy, many other objects may have existed, in perishable materials, of which nothing remains. The history of what is not recovered counts as much as that of museum pieces.

A piece of wood at Vindolanda

Even an isolated antique object does not close the debate. In 1992, in the second-century ditch of the Roman fort of Vindolanda, in the north of England, a life-sized wooden phallus is unearthed, among shoes, items of clothing, small tools and scraps of leather. It is first classified as a darning tool.

In 2023, Rob Collins, of Newcastle University, and Rob Sands, of University College Dublin, take up the analysis in the journal Antiquity. Both ends are distinctly smoother, a sign of repeated contact. The object is, to their knowledge, the first independent wooden phallus — not fixed to a figurine or a handle — preserved in the Roman world. The authors do not, however, make of it, from the outset, a dildo. They examine three hypotheses: a sexual instrument; a pestle, culinary or medicinal, whose form would also have had a symbolic value; or else an element intended to be inserted into a statue, which one touched in order to attract luck, as was common in the Empire. Collins puts it simply: one cannot be certain. The Greeks and the Romans knew sexual objects; the one from Vindolanda could be an example of them.

The excavators’ caution is here more instructive than any headline. A Roman phallus is not necessarily an object of pleasure. It was first of all, very often, an amulet, a sign of luck, a protection against the evil eye. For Vindolanda, the most honest course is to leave the three readings open.

What can be retained

There is not, as the sources now stand, a “first dildo” that one could date and designate without reserve. There are very ancient objects whose form evokes a male sex organ, and whose sexual use is possible, but not demonstrated. There is, in Athens, at the end of the fifth century BCE, a word and a description that leave no further doubt. There are, much later, Roman remains that the archaeologists themselves refuse to classify too quickly.

This caution takes nothing away from the interest of the subject. It recalls, above all, that the desire to find a unique ancestor sometimes says more about us than about the past. The materials have changed — stone, leather, wood, then glass, steel and silicone. The question itself is ancient. If you wish to discover what a dildo can be today, in safe materials and forms clearly thought out for pleasure, the Selfgasm shop makes it possible to linger over them without turning them into a myth.

Sources

• « South-Western Germany, Masculine Palaeolithic », World Archaeology, 6 September 2005, report on the work of Nicholas Conard and his team at Hohle Fels. World Archaeology
• Aristophanes, Lysistrata, 411 BCE, notably the passage at the beginning of the play (lines 107-110) on the leather olisboi.
• Rob Collins and Rob Sands, « Touch wood: luck, protection, power or pleasure? A wooden phallus from Vindolanda Roman fort », Antiquity, 2023, DOI 10.15184/aqy.2023.11. Institutional presentation: Newcastle University, 20 February 2023. Newcastle University

Photo: siltstone object from Hohle Fels (Schelklingen, Gravettian layer), photograph by Thilo Parg, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.