The Ancient History of Sex Toys

In 1992, excavators at Vindolanda — a Roman fort just south of Hadrian’s Wall — pulled a 16-centimeter piece of ash wood out of a ditch and catalogued it as a darning tool. It sat with the shoes and leather offcuts for thirty years. In 2023 two archaeologists looked at it again and said the quiet part: it’s a disembodied wooden phallus, the first one of its kind recovered from the Roman world.¹

They did not stamp “sex toy” on it and go home. Wear is heavier on the glans and the upper shaft, which could mean it was used as a dildo. It could also have been a pestle, or a piece that stuck out of a statue people touched for luck. The paper in Antiquity keeps the options open. Rob Collins, one of the authors, has said he’d like to think people on the frontier were having some fun with it. He’d also like you to notice that “sex toy” is our phrase, and that an object like this can be about power as easily as pleasure.

A cave in Germany

The one that gets called the oldest is a lot older than Rome. In 2005 a Tübingen team working Hohle Fels cave in southwestern Germany fitted a fourteenth siltstone fragment onto thirteen others they’d already had in storage. About 20 centimeters, polished, incised rings near one end. Dates from the same layer put it around 28,000 years ago.² It’s in the prehistory museum in Blaubeuren.

Nicholas Conard, who led the work, called it a symbolic representation of male genitalia. The same stone has wear from knapping flint. The museum’s label is pretty dry about that: knapping wear on a phallic stone, sexual use left thinkable. Popular writeups skip to “world’s oldest dildo.” The excavation report does not.

Photo: Hannes Wiedmann, CC BY-SA 4.0.

Leather from Miletus

Once you get into the classical world the materials get easier to name. Aristophanes’ Lysistrata, staged in 411 BCE, has the women of Athens complaining that the leather dildos from Miletus aren’t getting through because of the war. Greek vases from the same centuries are not subtle about it. The British Museum has a red-figure one from around 440–430 BCE that turns up in almost every writeup, and for once the object in the picture is doing what it looks like it’s doing.³

The usual reconstruction is leather stuffed with wool, used with olive oil. That’s from the comedies and the vases, which means it’s how Athenian men talked about what women used. Classicists have spent a long time arguing over the word olisbos. It shows up in Aristophanes as a leather penis, but it probably wasn’t the everyday term, and it may have started as a joke about a “slider.”⁴ People were making fun of these things in public. The word for them is still a fight.

Han dynasty tombs from what’s now Jiangsu have yielded hollow bronze phalluses — some of them shown at the Asian Art Museum in San Francisco in 2017 — that curators think could be worn. Jade plugs from those burials are a different problem, because jade also went in orifices after death to keep the body’s “essence” from leaking, so a jade object in a tomb is not automatically a bedroom object.⁵ In Japan, Edo-period harigata show up in shunga prints: ivory, horn, sometimes papier-mâché, often with a cord so they could be tied on.⁶

Most of what survives was written down by men, or buried with them. That doesn’t mean only men used the objects. It means you shouldn’t turn every find into a thesis about who pleasure was for.

Photo: Ashley Van Haeften, CC BY 2.0. The Vindolanda piece is wood from a ditch. This is the bronze luck-charm version of the same shape.

Wood almost never survives unless you get lucky with a waterlogged ditch in Northumberland. Nobody is putting a motor in anything. The upgrade, such as it is, is “this one doesn’t splinter.”

Deluvery is a same-night adult wellness delivery service in DC. We carry toys, lubes, condoms, and personal care, and everything arrives in plain packaging with a forgettable name on the card statement. None of that has a 2,000-year-old ancestor. Hiding the object is a new problem. Finding one in a ditch is not.

Rubber you can mold, then a plug you can stick in the wall, is a later story. The vibrator shapes people actually buy now are a much later fork.

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Notes

1. Rob Collins and Rob Sands, “Touch wood: luck, protection, power or pleasure? A wooden phallus from Vindolanda Roman fort,” Antiquity, 2023. Ash, about 16 cm, excavated 1992, re-interpreted 2023. On display at the Vindolanda museum. ↩

2. “Ancient phallus unearthed in cave,” BBC News, 2005. Hohle Fels siltstone phallus, ~20 cm, reassembled from 14 fragments; Nicholas Conard, University of Tübingen. Also: Museum für Urgeschichte und Eiszeitkunst, Blaubeuren, object record (~30,000 years before present). ↩

3. “The long and satisfying 28,000-year history of the dildo”, The Conversation, 2023. Includes the British Museum red-figure vase (c. 440–430 BCE) and the Vindolanda find. ↩

4. Max Nelson, “A Note on the Olisbos,” Glotta, 2000. Argues olisbos was not the standard Greek word for a dildo, and may have begun as a comic coinage. ↩

5. “From a Jade Suit to Bronze Dildos, Ancient Tomb Luxuries of the Han Dynasty Elite,” Hyperallergic, on the Asian Art Museum’s Tomb Treasures exhibition (2017). Bronze phalluses; jade orifice plugs also interpreted as mortuary. ↩

6. British Museum, Shunga: Sex and Pleasure in Japanese Art (2013). Edo-period prints depicting harigata; see also the museum’s shunga research and the accompanying catalogue essays. ↩