Toilets from all around the world and throughout history, from the Indiana Jones and Ansel Adams of latrines.
Skarkos is one of the most important prehistoric sites in the Aegean. It's a settlement of the Cyclades culture on the island of Ios. An estimated two to three hundred people lived here during the 3rd millennium BCE, spanning the late Neolithic Age into the early Bronze Age. The site is exceptionally well-preserved. It laid buried and untouched until the 1980s. However, it gets little attention…
Akrotiri is a prehistoric settlement of the Cycladic culture along the southern shore of Thira, commonly called Santorini, the southernmost of the Cycladic islands in the Aegean sea. The settlement was abandoned shortly before the catastrophic Thira Eruption around 1600 BCE. The city was preserved by being buried in ash, much like Pompeii was some 17 centuries later. You can visit the site and see…
Ephesus is famous for its connection to early Christianity. However, early Christianity was an obscure minor sect within Judaism. It arose within very different religious environments. Often, as in a large and cosmopolitan Roman-ruled Greek city like Ephesus, there was a kaleidoscope of other faiths. For the first century or two, a Christian church was a group or community, but there weren't…
The exodus of the Hebrew people out of slavery in Egypt is described in the second book of the Torah, called "Exodus" in many languages. It describes their trek through Sinai, and their leader Moses ascending a mountain to receive the Ten Commandments. You can hike up the mountain traditionally thought to be that mountain, and you can spend the night on the summit waiting for sunrise, as I did.…
Ages ago, I had a "Toilets of the Bible" page. Just one page, which was rather unambitious, and by "the Bible" I meant the combined Hebrew Bible and the New Testament, which was rather naive. Those oversights have been addressed! I don't know of any religious community that has its own special designs for bathroom fixtures, but there certainly are specific regulations for where to place the…
Glass vessels found at Pergamon, a wealthy and powerful Greek city near the western coast of Asia Minor, contain residue showing that their contents also contained human feces. There is a wealth of textual descriptions of fecal-based remedies in Roman medicine, but direct material confirmation remains exceptionally rare. The glass vessels are unguentaria, small bottles of a form common across the…
The Jewish people interacted with a wide range of other cultures, picking up pieces of foreign religions and mythologies along the way. This included two Mesopotamian demons of the toilet: Šulak, the Babylonian Lurker of the Latrine, and Ba'al-Peor, the Assyrian Lord of Excretion. A Babylonian medical text from 1069-1046 BCE discussed Šulak, and some of that lore made its way into the Talmud. The…
Worship of the primeval Mother-Goddess Cybele, celebrated by priests who had castrated themselves, continued into the early Christian period at Hierapolis in south-western Anatolia. Her temple was built on a fissure that emitted a suffocating flow of carbon dioxide. Her priests knew the ancient trick for descending into the small cave, spending time there, and emerging alive, convincing celebrants…
Apollo was the primary deity of ancient Korinthos, but the city hosted mystery rites at a sacred spring, and was home to a significant Jewish population and a small but growing early Christian community. Everyone had to use the toilet and keep clean, and today you can see ruins of two major baths and public latrines. "Well-Watered Korinthos" was supplied by springs flowing down from Akrokorinthos,…
The rites of the Eleusian Mysteries came from a Neolithic agrarian cult in Anatolia. Starting some time before the 16th century BCE, and continuing about two millennia until they were banned as a pagan cult in 395 CE and the site was sacked by the Goths the following year, they were celebrated annually. The annual multi-day rites involved a sacred well where the goddess Demeter was resting during…
Gustave Caillebotte was best known as a patron and promoter of art and not as an artist himself. That changed after the Art Institute of Chicago acquired his "Paris street, rainy day", a large oil painting that was Impressionistic but also included influences of photography. His two paintings of a man drying off after his bath led to some controversy.
The great surrealist was born in 1904 in Figueras, in the northeast corner of Spain within Catalonia. See the family's bathroom with its toilet, tub, bidet, and sink, along with the kitchen and its granite sink which tempted the young Salvador to first dream of being a chef rather than an artist. Includes an analysis of the history of toilet paper and its eventual introduction into western Europe,…
Like their stationary Spanish cousins, the toilets in Spanish trains and train stations are very nice. Learn about the division between Standard gauge and Iberian gauge in the Spanish rail system, the development of regular and high-speed passenger rail service, and the current state of washrooms on Spanish trains and in Spanish stations.
Osaka was largely destroyed by U.S. bombing during World War II. Much of its infrastructure was built in a hurry immediately after the war. Eighty years later, the water distribution network had numerous problems. An anonymous donor gave the city 21 kilograms of gold bars worth ¥ 560,000,000, specifically to repair and improve the 259 kilometers of water pipes.
Kohler's Dekoda is a US$ 600 device that you clip onto the rim of your toilet. For an additional monthly or annual subscription fee, it gives you rather approximate and incomplete health reports based on pictures of your urine and feces in the bowl. The scary part is that it uploads the pictures, associated with your account information, to Kohler's servers where they say that they will keep it…
Pullman, Illinois, was a planned "company town" created for the workers at George Pullman's sleeper railway car factory. It was an early experiment in separated drainage systems, with independent pipe networks isolating wastewater from rainwater.
Cloacina was the Roman goddess of sewers, simultaneously the goddess of filth and the goddess of beauty. She is named for cloaca, the Latin for "sewer" or "drain". Remains of a shrine to her can still be today seen in the Forum in Rome, where she watched over the Cloaca Maxima or the Great Sewer. See where the multiple lines of the Great Sewer ran through and beneath the Forum, and where it still…
See the large public latrine next to Pompey's portico, which was used as the Roman Senate house. The Senate met there, and it was where Julius Caesar was assassinated on 15 March 44 BCE.
Saint Peter's Basilica is one of four Papal basilicas in and around Rome. See toilets at the Vatican and also at the Lateran Basilica, which is actually the Pope's home church rather than Saint Peter's.
Italy has the highest prevalence of standalone ceramic bidets I've ever seen. There are ancient toilets and drains, going back to what originally were the Greek colonies of Pompeii and Paestum. In Rome you can see the public latrines at Pompey's portico, where the Roman Senta met and where Julius Caesar was assassinated. The subterranean temples of the Mithraic Mysteries, a cult that was a strong…
A 12th century Christian basilica was built in Rome on top of a church from the late 4th century. That church had been built on top of an earlier structure that included a Mithraeum, a cave-temple in in which the rituals of the Mithraic Mysteries were practiced. Mithraic rituals had to be carried out in hidden subterranean spaces, and they required a nearby source of fresh water and adequate…
Rapa Nui, or Easter Island, is home to the mysterious mo'ai, the megalithic statues representing deified ancestors. But, you wonder, what are the toilets like on the island? See the kitchen and bathroom in a rented apartment, bathrooms in cafes and restaurants, and the lakes formed when volcanic calderas collect rainfall, the primary source of drinking water from the first settlement to today.
Eugene V. Debs was a prominent labor organizer and leader in the late 19th and early 20th century. He ran for U.S. President five times, the last of those when he Convict Number 9653 in a federal prison after being convicted of sedition for speaking out against U.S. involvement in World War I. His home in Terre Haute, Indiana, is now a museum.
On a recent visit to Japan I was first mystified, then impressed, and eventually VERY impressed by the presence of fixtures specifically for colostomy and related patients in public toilets. It's yet another thing that's casual and routine in Japan but unknown in, as far as I know, the rest of the world.
In 2020–2023 the Shibuya Ward city government established the Tokyo Toilet project. It commissioned sixteen prominent architects to design seventeen public toilets. And of course, when I visited Japan in 2024 I went to all 17! Follow along for a virtual tour of amazingly clean, pleasant, and helpful public facilities.
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