Every society has rules about the menstruating body. What varies — enormously — is what those rules say, who they bind, and what they are understood to accomplish.

In the spring of 1904, on a farm called Rällinge in the Swedish province of Södermanland, a twelve-year-old boy turned up a small bronze man in a potato field. The figure sits cross-legged, wears a pointed cap, tugs at a pointed beard, and has an unmistakable erection. He is seven centimetres tall…

In 1810 an English officer of the East India Company named Edward Moor published The Hindu Pantheon, a compendium of Indian religious imagery assembled for a European readership. Among the plates was a smooth, rounded stone column set into a lipped circular base. Moor described it plainly as a…

In February 1838, a young officer of the Bengal Engineers named T. S. Burt left his assigned route in central India because the men carrying his palanquin told him there was something worth seeing in the forest. What he found, and reported later that year to the Asiatic Society of Bengal, was a…

Quiz Challenge Start Challenge /* ---- LOCAL THEME TOKENS (edit these to retheme the whole quiz) ---- */ .qz-wrap{ /* Neutral "museum vitrine" pastels — calm, archival, non-clichéd */ --qz-accent: #6E8FA0; /* dusty slate-teal — primary…

The English word for the forbidden arrived by ship. During his third Pacific voyage in 1777, Captain James Cook recorded the Polynesian term tapu in his journals, describing a system of restriction he could observe but not translate.

Every society moves its children into adulthood, and a surprising number of them do it through the body. A boy is cut, a girl is secluded, a young man is tattooed, a young woman is bathed and dressed and presented.

In October 2013 the British Museum opened Shunga: Sex and Pleasure in Japanese Art, a survey of Japanese woodblock prints, paintings and illustrated books produced roughly between 1600 and 1900. It ran until 5 January 2014 and was curated by Timothy Clark, head of the museum's Japanese section,…

Most ancient civilizations hand historians one kind of evidence and expect them to make do. Sometimes it is a wall of images with no explanatory text. Sometimes it is a body of literature with almost no surviving artwork.