Written in Stone

Rediscovering the Ancient Roots of Human Diversity

I’ve been told this growing up, from my peers, family members and society. I have heard it whispered in crowded rooms and shouted from digital pulpits: that being part of the LGBTQ+ community is an act of arrogance, a symptom of a selfish generation, and a “modern disease” that signals the beginning of the end for humanity. The narrative is always the same — that homosexuality is a byproduct of modernization, a glitch in our mental stability caused by the glow of our devices and the decay of “traditional” values. But if this is a modern disease, why is it etched into the stone of four-thousand-year-old tombs? If this is just a corrupt generation, why did it exist in the heart of Greece and the courts of Egypt? What about ancient Rome and Japan, long before a British ship ever touched their shores, all these countries had a past, a history that accepted same sex partners. So why was it accepted before but degraded now? Is this really a modern disease, or is it just colonizer morals blurring the real history that man once accepted and made room for?

We are told that we are protecting our heritage by condemning these identities, but a deeper look at history suggests the opposite. What if the “morals” we defend today aren’t actually ours? What if the true “foreign import” wasn’t homosexuality, but the very laws and hatred used to criminalize it? To understand the truth, we must look past the colonial veil and rediscover a world where these identities weren’t just a present concept— they were part of the fabric of human history.

Let us start in the silent, sun-drenched corridors of Ancient Egypt. Though perhaps not formalized as marriage, evidence suggests that homosexuality existed and was accepted in Ancient Egypt. It is found that there was even a third gender category called the sekhet alongside male(tai) and female(hmt). For context, the term appears in legal or religious texts (e.g., at Edfu Temple) which suggest they were seen as men who were not male, implying a position outside the binary, and even though sekhet is translated as eunuch, there is little to no evidence of these individuals being castrated, The existance of sekhet shows that there was a more fluid understanding of gender in Ancient Egyptian culture.

Another prominent example of the depiction of homosexuality in Egyptian culture is the 5th Dynasty tomb of Niankhkhnum and Khnumhotep, who were Egyptian royal manicurists and confidants. They were buried together in a lavish Saqqara tomb. They are often cited as potentially the first recorded same-sex couple in history, the men are depicted in intimate, embracing poses — including nose-to-nose contact — usually reserved for husbands and wives. Even though some historians attempt to dismiss this as fraternal, the artistic style is identical to that of married couples, and not only male, but female same-sex relationships were also recorded in ancient Egypt. Examples for such records are the statues like that of Idet and Ruiu, which show two women in a shared embrace, similar to conjugal imagery. A later “magical plaque” from the 3rd century CE also contains a spell by a woman named Gorgonia seeking the love of another woman named Sophia.

So, no specific Egyptian laws have been found that criminalize consensual same-sex acts between adults, and while Ancient Egypt valued the “ideal” family unit for fertility and inheritance, same-sex relationships clearly existed and were, in some cases, openly commemorated in high-status tombs.

So how did homosexuality, which was accepted back then, turn into something immoral and sinful? Well, to answer that, we would have to go to the 1st century CE, where Christianity, and the 7th century CE, where Islam introduced religious doctrines which forbade same-sex acts. Not only this, the Hellenistic and Roman influences also played a part in these modern beliefs. During the later periods of ancient history, contact with other empires (like the Greeks and Romans) began to influence Egyptian views, often introducing more rigid gender-based hierarchies where being the “passive” partner was increasingly stigmatized, and then, from the 1880s to the 1950s, British rule began.

In 1885, the British government introduced new penal codes that criminalized various forms of “homosexual behavior”. Many of the laws used today to target LGBTQ+ individuals in Egypt are direct legacies of these colonial-era regulations. The modern legal charge of “habitual debauchery” (Law 10 of 1961), often used by Egyptian authorities to prosecute same-sex acts, has its roots in these colonial influences. So simply said British colonial administrators brought Victorian-era social values that strictly separated “private” and “public” morality, often viewing indigenous sexual practices as “primitive” or “immoral” into these cultures that once accepted this before, and now in contemporary Egypt, some leaders frame LGBTQ+ rights as a form of “Western neo-colonialism”. Ironically, the state uses laws inherited from former colonizers to “protect” its culture from what it now labels as “foreign” Western values. Also, the modern state often positions itself as the “guardian of public morality” to assert political authority, leading to high-profile crackdowns like the Queen Boat case (2001) or the arrests after the Mashrou’ Leila concert (2017).

So we can see clearly that homosexuality was once accepted in ancient Egypt, but foreign morals and values overwrote these cultures, and now something that was once accepted by their ancestors is being called illegal and sinful by the same society.

Now let us move further up from the sun-drenched tombs of Egypt to the marble halls of Ancient Greece and Rome, and even here we would not find a ‘new’ deviation, but rather a society where same-sex love was woven into the very definition of citizenship, heroism, and education. While the modern critic might view these identities as a ‘breakdown’ of the social order, the Greeks viewed the Bands of Thebes — an elite military unit composed entirely of pairs of male lovers — as the highest form of civic strength. They were active roughly between 378 and 338 BCE. They were a legendary force comprised of 150 pairs of male lovers (300 men total) based on the philosophical belief that a soldier would fight with greater courage to protect or impress his partner than he would for a stranger. Not only this, but on the island of Lesbos, the poet Sappho (from whose name we get the terms “Sapphic” and “Lesbian”) wrote some of the most enduring erotic literature in history. Her work, such as the Ode to Aphrodite, speaks of a deep, agonizing, and beautiful desire for other women. That her face was struck onto local coins and her poetry taught for centuries proves that this “modern disease” was, in fact, an ancient treasure, and in Greek mythology — the very foundation of their religion — is saturated with same-sex love. From Apollo and Hyacinthus to Zeus and Ganymede, the Greeks saw their gods as figures who transcended the binary of modern attraction. If the gods themselves loved across gender lines, how could a mortal society call it a “glitch” or a “decay of values”?

In one of the most famous philosophical texts in history, Plato’s characters discuss the origins of love. One theory presented is that humans were originally “double-beings” (some male-male, some female-female, and some male-female) who were split in half by the gods. Seeking your “other half” meant finding the gender that completed your soul — a concept that treated same-sex attraction as a pursuit of wholeness, not a symptom of selfishness.

Not only in Greece, but also in Rome, same-sex relationships existed, but it wasn’t the same as in Greece; they focused on the heroic aspect of love, but for the Romans, sexuality was less about “identity” and more about dominance and status. To the Roman citizen, the gender of the partner was secondary compared to the power dynamic of the couple. Perhaps the most poignant evidence of this is the story of Emperor Hadrian and his lover, Antinous. When Antinous tragically drowned in the Nile in 130 CE, Hadrian’s grief was so profound and public that he did something unprecedented: he declared Antinous a god. He founded the city of Antinopolis in his honor and commissioned thousands of statues of his lover, which were erected across the Empire. This wasn’t a hidden “glitch” in the Emperor’s mind; it was a state-sanctioned, empire-wide celebration of same-sex devotion that lasted for centuries.

Another important point is that long before the modern “debate” over marriage equality, Roman history records emperors entering into same-sex unions. Nero is recorded to have married two men, Pythagoras and Sporus, in public ceremonies. While later (often Christian-influenced) historians used these stories to paint Nero as “decadent,” the fact remains that the Roman legal and social structure of the time had the vocabulary and the space for such unions to occur in the light of day.

Also, the Warren cup, a silver drinking vessel, dating back to the 1st century CE, depicts scenes of consensual same-sex male intimacy in a highly refined, classical style. It wasn’t “underground pornography”; it was high-end art used in the homes of the Roman elite, proving that such relationships were a normalized part of the domestic and social fabric, and even in Roman literature, there are many instances of men admiring men. The poet Catullus wrote some of the most famous verses in Latin history to his lover, Juventius. To these writers, desire was a force of nature — as common and undeniable as the wind — rather than a “modern disease” to be cured.

Another important thing about the Romans and the Greeks is that they didn’t even have words for “homosexual” or “heterosexual.” So, just like in Egypt, these were not whispers in the dark, but stories told in stone, law, and poetry. So, if even in a society built on extreme masculinity and military might, same-sex attraction was not seen as “weakness,” how did these people in the present come to condemn a behavior that was once widely accepted among them and even their emperors?

The answer to that can be obtained through the fact that the transition from Rome’s celebrated unions to modern ‘debauchery’ laws was not a slow evolution of morality; it was a series of sharp, deliberate breaks in history. It reveals a striking irony: the love was indigenous, but the prohibition was the import. Ultimately, the ‘foreign import’ wasn’t the affection, but the legal cage built to contain it. The first major shift occurred under the Roman Emperor Justinian I, who was heavily influenced by early Christian doctrines that sought to differentiate the “new” Roman Empire from its “pagan” past. Justinian issued some of the first state-wide laws specifically criminalizing same-sex acts. These weren’t based on biology or “public health,” but on the theological belief that such acts caused natural disasters like earthquakes.

Another tangible piece of evidence that shows that homophobia and the condemnation towards it were brought through foreign imports is Section 377 of the British Penal Code. Introduced in the 1860s, this law was exported to nearly every corner of the British Empire — from India and Egypt to Nigeria and Malaysia. It codified “carnal intercourse against the order of nature” as a crime. When the British left, they left the law behind. Today, more than half of the countries that criminalize LGBTQ+ identities are using versions of the very same laws drafted by 19th-century British bureaucrats.

Egypt, Greece, and Rome were not the only countries that had these values that were later overwritten by colonizers and foreign religious beliefs. Let us travel eastward now, across vast oceans, to the islands of Japan, where same-sex relationships were not hidden away but celebrated as part of warrior culture and spiritual life. In pre-modern Japan, male-male love was known as nanshoku (“male colors”) or shudō (“the way of adolescent boys”). Among Buddhist monks and especially the samurai class, these bonds were seen as noble and strengthening. Older warriors would take younger apprentices as lovers, forming deep, often exclusive relationships based on loyalty, mentorship, and mutual courage — much like the Sacred Band of Thebes in Greece. This was even considered a purer bond than marriage as it didn’t focus on the practicalities of property or procreation. Samurai believed that fighting beside one’s beloved made a man braver and more devoted on the battlefield.

Famous writers like Ihara Saikaku even published bestselling books in the 17th century openly praising male-male romance, such as The Great Mirror of Male Love. Shinto tradition, Japan’s native religion, carried no condemnation of same-sex love. This acceptance lasted for centuries — until the late 19th century, when Japan rapidly modernized and adopted Western Victorian-era moral codes during the Meiji Restoration. Once again, what some today label a “modern disease” or “Western import” was deeply rooted in Japanese society and warrior ethos long before any British or American ship brought new ideas to their shores.

Across every continent and every era, the evidence remains the same: human desire has never been a static or singular thing. It is a river that has always carved its own path, regardless of the dams built by later doctrines. When we look at these artifacts, we aren’t seeing a ‘new’ rebellion; we are seeing the original, unedited version of ourselves.

From the tombs of Egypt to the samurai of Japan, from the philosophers of Greece to the emperors of China, and across the diverse societies of Africa and South Asia, same-sex love and gender fluidity appear again and again throughout human history. This was never a ‘modern disease’ invented by a selfish new generation, nor a sign that humanity is doomed. Our ancestors made room for it — in art, in poetry, in military bonds, in royal courts, and in everyday life, and even viewed it as the purest bond of all. What we face today is not the sudden collapse of ‘traditional values,’ but the long shadow of later religious doctrines and colonial laws that tried to erase or criminalize what was once simply part of the human story. Recognizing this history doesn’t make anyone selfish or wrong. It simply reminds us that love, in all its forms, has always been with us. Far from ending humanity, it has been woven into the fabric of civilizations for thousands of years. The question isn’t whether these identities are new, cause the evidence proves they are not. The real question is whether we will finally stop allowing outdated frameworks to define our past and our future, and instead start respecting the diverse ways of being human that have existed since ancient times.