The origin of circumcision is not known with certainty; however, artistic and literary evidence from ancient Egypt suggests it was practiced in the ancient Near East from at least the Sixth Dynasty (ca. 2345–ca. 2181 BCE). The notion of Milah being linked to a covenant is generally believed to have originated in the 6th century BCE as a product of the Babylonian captivity; the practice almost certainly lacked this significance among Jews before the period.[1][2][3][4] The original version in Judaic history was either a ritual nick or cut to the acroposthion: the part of the foreskin that overhangs the glans penis. This form of genital nicking or cutting, known as simply Milah, became adopted among Jews by the Second Temple period and was the predominant form until the second century CE.[2][5][6][7][8] By the period of the Maccabees, many Jewish men attempted to hide their circumcisions through the process of epispasm due to the circumstances of the period.[2] Intact genitals, including the foreskin, were considered a sign of beauty, civility, and masculinity throughout the Greco-Roman world.[2][9][10] And it was custom to spend an hour a day or so exercising nude in the gymnasium and in Roman baths; many Jewish men did not want to be seen in public deprived of their foreskins, where matters of business and politics were discussed.[10] To expose one's glans in public was seen as indecent, vulgar, and a sign of sexual arousal and desire.[2][9][10] Classical, Hellenistic, and Roman culture widely found circumcision to be barbaric, cruel, and utterly repulsive in nature.[2][9][11][12] Jewish religious writers denounced these practices as abrogating the covenant of Abraham in 1 Maccabees and the Talmud.[10] After Christianity and Second Temple Judaism split apart from one another, Milah was declared spiritually unnecessary by Christian writers such as Paul the Apostle and subsequently in the Council of Jerusalem, while it further increased in importance for Jews.[2] In the mid-2nd century, Rabbinical Jewish leaders, the successors of the newly ideologically dominant Pharisees, introduced and made mandatory a radical method of circumcision known as the Brit Periah.[2][5][6][8] Without it, circumcision was newly declared to have no spiritual value.[6] This new form removed as much of the inner mucosa as possible, the frenulum and its corresponding delta from the penis, and prevented the movement of shaft skin, in what creates a "low and tight" circumcision.[2][13] It was intended to make it almost impossible to restore the foreskin.[2][5][6] This is the form practiced among the large majority of Jews today, and, later, became the basis for the routine neonatal circumcisions performed in the United States and other Anglosphere countries. According to saying 53 of the Gospel of Thomas, Jesus says: His disciples said to him, "is circumcision useful or not?" He said to them, "If it were useful, their father would produce children already circumcised from their mother. Rather, the true circumcision in spirit has become profitable in every respect."