Hittite law from the 16th century BC through to the 13th century BC explicitly permitted sex with the dead. A common theme in these artifacts is the masturbation of a male skeleton by a living woman.

Herodotus also alluded to suggestions that the Greek tyrant Periander had defiled the corpse of his wife, employing a metaphor: 'Periander baked his bread in a cold oven.' Acts of necrophilia are depicted on ceramics from the Moche culture, which reigned in northern Peru from the first to eighth century CE. Herodotus writes in The Histories that, to discourage intercourse with a corpse, ancient Egyptians left deceased beautiful women to decay for 'three or four days' before giving them to the embalmers. Singular accounts of necrophilia in history are sporadic, though written records suggest the practice was present within Ancient Egypt. In the ancient world, sailors returning corpses to their home country were often accused of necrophilia. Psychiatrist Bénédict Morel popularised the term about a decade later when discussing Bertrand. The ancients, in speaking about lycanthropy, have cited examples to which one can more or less relate the case which has just now attracted the public attention so strongly. However, don't think that we are dealing here with a form of phrenopathy which appears for the first time. The alienists have adopted, as a new form, the case of Sergeant Bertrand, the disinterrer of cadavers on whom all the newspapers have recently reported. It is within the category of the destructive madmen that one needs to situate certain patients to whom I would like to give the name of necrophiliacs. The plural term 'nécrophiles' was coined by Belgian physician Joseph Guislain in his lecture series, Leçons Orales Sur Les Phrénopathies, given around 1850, about the contemporary necrophiliac François Bertrand:

Various terms for the crime of corpse-violation animate sixteenth- through nineteenth-century works on law and legal medicine.

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