Beginning in the later twentieth century, historians of the ancient Near East subjected the sacred prostitution theory to closer scrutiny and found the evidentiary base far thinner than earlier scholarship had assumed. Herodotus, writing as a Greek outsider generations after the practice he describes would have ended, is not corroborated by any surviving Babylonian or Mesopotamian source, cultic, legal or administrative, describing such a custom, despite an extensive surviving textual record from those cultures that would be expected to mention an institution of this scale.
The Hebrew terms qedeshah and qadesh are now generally read by scholars as naming temple personnel with cultic functions unrelated to sex, and the prophetic condemnations that mention them are increasingly read as polemical rhetoric equating foreign worship with sexual immorality rather than as literal ethnographic description.
Stephanie Budin's influential 2008 study argued the entire ancient institution was a scholarly construction built from misread, hostile or literary sources rather than a documented historical practice. This atlas records sacred prostitution as a historiographical subject, a claim with a long and influential history in the study of religion that current scholarship treats as largely unsupported by the ancient evidence it was built on.