Erotic artwork and inscriptions were so rampant in pre-volcano Pompeii that modern archeologists restricted access to large portions of the preserved city until quite recently, fearing an adverse reaction to the amatory murals. When researchers from Oxford deciphered a gigantic collection of two-thousand-year-old papyrus from a garbage dump in Egypt, they found themselves reading copies of a wildly popular book of erotica — the Fifty Shades of Grey of Alexandria. The Moche people of what is now Peru were painting scenes of anal sex on their pottery in the first centuries A.D. Temples in India from the tenth century sport graphically-carved orgies. Japanese wood-block prints in the shunga style depicted explicit sexual liaisons from the thirteenth century on. In the fifteenth century, no sooner had the printing press concluded its Bible-printing duties than it got to work on porn. In 1749, Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure (commonly known as Fanny Hill) caused a sensation in England and throughout Europe, and the book was first banned and collected by smut-hungry noblemen, with the debauched writings of the Marquis de Sade only a few decades away.