Indecent speech is protected and may be regulated, but not banned. government from restricting speech based on its content. The first instances of modern pornography date back to the sixteenth century when sexually explicit images differentiated itself from traditional sexual representations in European art by combining the traditionally explicit representation of sex and the moral norms of those times. Pornography has existed throughout recorded history and has adapted to each new medium, including photography, cinema, video, and computers and the internet. Despite their occasional repression, depictions of erotic themes have been common for millennia. England's (and the world's) first laws criminalising pornography were enacted with the passage of the Obscene Publications Act of 1857. The movable objects were locked away in the Secret Museum in Naples, and what could not be removed was covered and cordoned off so as to not corrupt the sensibilities of women, children and the working class. They did not know what to do with the frank depictions of sexuality, and endeavored to hide them away from everyone but upper-class scholars. When large-scale excavations of Pompeii were undertaken in the 1860s, much of the erotic art of the Romans came to light, shocking the Victorians who saw themselves as the intellectual heirs of the Roman Empire. In some cases, the possession of certain books, engravings or image collections was outlawed, but the trend to compose laws that actually restricted viewing sexually explicit things in general was a Victorian construct.
Though some specific sex acts were regulated or prohibited by earlier laws, merely looking at objects or images depicting them was not outlawed in any country until 1857. It first appeared in an English medical dictionary in 1857 defined as "a description of prostitutes or of prostitution, as a matter of public hygiene." By 1864, the first version of the modern definition had appeared in Webster's Dictionary: "licentious painting employed to decorate the walls of rooms sacred to bacchanalian orgies, examples of which exist in Pompeii." This was the beginning of what today refers to explicit pictures in general. Its current definition was added in the 1860s, replacing the older one meaning writings about prostitutes. The modern concept of pornography did not exist until the Victorian era. In early times, erotic depictions were often a subset of the indigenous or religious art of cultures and as such were not set aside or treated differently than any other type. A pederastic courtship scene on an Athenian black-figure amphora (c.