Bestiality was a widespread common practice in antiquity

* Prehistoric man probably was not bound by any self-image in regard to sexuality, and "was likely to have made many such attempts"[3].

* "Bestiality... existed as a rather widespread practice in all the nations of antiquity of which we have adequate records. Where it is not specifically mentioned, it may be legitimately inferred on the basis of the over-all evidence." (Masters)

* A cave painting from at least 8000 BC in the Northern Italian Val Camonica "depicts a black man complete with full erection standing behind a female deer. The viewer is left in no doubt that he intends to have sex with her. We clearly cannot say if our prehistoric artist depicts himself, or something which he has observed someone else doing. What we can deduce however is that he has an intimate knowledge of the external sexual organs of this animal, and that it was made before any known taboos against sex with animals existed."[4]

* The Sagaholm is a Swedish barrow with zoosexual carvings that dates to the early Nordic Bronze Age.

* In ancient Egypt, the animal aspects of the gods ensured that bestiality would be practiced both for religious and magical purposes. Herodotus states religious bestiality was practiced in Egypt - the most famous example being of course the copulations of women with goats. Voltaire spoke of sexual relations between Egyptian women and sacred goats, citing Plutarch and Pindar as his sources (Strabo and Plutarch both confirm Herodotus' mention [Bk 2, § 46] of an Egyptian woman having public sex with a goat). The scholar and anthropologist Lang states that the Egyptian women submitted to he-goats while the "men committed the sin of impurity with she-goats." (See: Goat of Mendes). At El Yemen, trained baboons were popular sex partners with men and women alike. Similarly, in the Nile and Indus Valleys, monkeys were instructed in the art of manipulating the genitals of both sexes. It is recorded that dog-faced baboons once fornicated with women "throughout Egypt and the length and breadth of the Arab world". Finally it is often related that the Egyptians "mastered the art of sexual congress with the crocodile" by turning it on its back. (Masters)

* In ancient Greece, Xenophon records sex with goats. Norman Haire (Hymen) states "since the Greek myths contain many stories of gods who assumed the shape of animals in order to mate with mortals, we may judge that even bestiality was not regarded as revolting."

* Plutarch and Virgil state of Greece, that: "it commits very frequently and in many places great outrages, disorders and scandals against nature, in the matter of this pleasure of love; for there are men who have loved she-goats, sows and mares," (Discourse on the Reason of Beasts, xvii) Pliny states that Semiramis prostituted herself to her horse, and Venette says that "there is nothing more common in Egypt than that young women have intercourse with bucks."

* Robson, in "Bestiality and bestial rape in Greek myth" (1997) suggests three points of departure for analyzing Greek myth: 1) sex with animals as pornography, 2) as part of hunting ritual, and 3) as bestial myths and/or male initiation rituals.

* Martial and other writers state that in Roman times, women sometimes inserted snakes into their sexual parts. Curiously, this is reported to have been both for sexual purposes and also as a means to keeping cool and deodorizing that part of the body in the heat of summer. Lucian comments that snakes were taught to suckle on women's nipples. Juvenal states in the Mysteries of the Bona Dea, that "if... men are wanting, she [the Roman woman] does not delay to submit her buttocks to a young ass placed over her." Roman society had around 12 formal categories of prostitute, the lower of whom performed with animals.

* Interestingly, the Jewish code of law (the Talmud) found it necessary to proscribe specifically women from being alone in the company of animals, in order to rule out suspicion (Muth 1969, Christy 1970).

[link to en.wikipedia.org]