Daniel's prompt this week is basically a tour of the room where civilization quietly did its most honest work. He points out that a toilet today, even a grim public one, is a palace compared to most of human history, and he wants us to look at the weird spaces people built for relief, from the Indus Valley to the medieval castle, and figure out whether the story is one of progress or something more like a loop.
The loop is the part that gets me. Because the first thing most people think is, oh, we started in filth and climbed steadily to porcelain. And that's just not what the archaeology says. The Indus Valley had covered drains and flush toilets four and a half thousand years ago, and then the idea basically vanished for millennia. You don't get a straight line, you get a wave that crashes and re-forms.
So the palace comparison cuts both ways. A modern basic toilet has a water trap, a flush, privacy, and a sewer connection. Most Romans never had all four. But a resident of Mohenjo-daro in twenty six hundred BCE had a toilet hole that flushed with a jar of water into a covered brick drain that ran to a soak pit. That's closer to a modern system than anything London had in eighteen fifty.
Almost every house at Harappa and Mohenjo-daro had a private bath and toilet area. More than seven hundred wells at Mohenjo-daro alone. The upper storey bathrooms ran through enclosed terracotta pipes into the street drains. And the drains had inspection holes at regular intervals. That's not a society figuring out sanitation, that's a society that already treats it as infrastructure.
The skeptic's note here is worth keeping. Shereen Ratnagar wrote a paper with a title that sounds like a podcast episode in itself. The drainage systems at Mohenjo-daro and Nausharo, a technological breakthrough or a stinking disaster? Her point is that finding drains doesn't tell you what flowed through them or how well they worked.
Fair, but the sheer density of the planning is hard to dismiss. You don't build inspection holes into a system that's decorative. And at Lothal, the ruler's house had a latrine that discharged into a street drain that emptied into the town dock. The lower town used soak jars, big buried urns with a hole in the bottom, that got emptied and cleaned regularly. So even the less fancy version was managed.
And then it all goes away. The system collapses with the civilization, and for the next couple thousand years you get a much patchier picture. Mesopotamia had clay sewer pipes around four thousand BCE, the earliest at the Temple of Bel at Nippur. Egypt's Pyramid of Sahure complex had copper drainage pipes. Minoan Crete had stone sewers flushed by rain, and there's an inverted siphon system in the Cretan palaces that's reportedly still working after three thousand years.
Still working. That's the thing that makes me pause. We like to think of ancient plumbing as a crude sketch of what we'd eventually perfect, but some of it was excellent engineering that got lost and had to be reinvented.
And then you get to Rome, which everyone assumes is the high point of ancient hygiene, and the reality is a lot more... I want to say fragrant.
The Cloaca Maxima is real and it's enormous. Ann Olga Koloski-Ostrow says its length and breadth rival main sewer lines in many modern cities. The Etruscans laid the first underground sewers around five hundred BCE. But her argument is that Roman sewers were mainly for draining standing water, not for removing waste. The streets were cluttered with dung, vomit, garbage, rotting vegetables, animal skins and guts. The sewer wasn't a waste removal system, it was flood control.
And the toilets themselves. Virtually no Pompeii or Herculaneum toilets connected to the main sewer. Most private houses had a one-seater cesspit toilet, and they often put it in the kitchen. Next to the food.
That's the detail I can't get past. You're preparing dinner and the family latrine is right there. The waste got sold to farmers or used in gardens, so there was an economy around it, but the smell in a Roman kitchen must have been something else.
The public latrines are where it gets properly outlandish. Dark, dank, dirty, often in small spaces. One at Ostia could handle twenty plus people at once. No stalls, just a long bench with holes and a gutter running in front.
And the toilet paper was a communal sponge on a stick. Shared. Between strangers. Rinsed in water and handed to the next person.
I've read that sentence a dozen times and it still lands like a punchline that isn't one.
It gets worse. The latrines were notorious for methane and hydrogen sulphide gas explosions. Flames literally exploded from the seat openings. Rats bit people's bottoms. Romans believed demons lived in the toilets, and there's a Pompeii graffito warning, crapper beware the evil. The goddess Fortuna shows up on toilet walls as a guardian.
So the Roman toilet was a dark room where you sat next to strangers, shared a sponge, risked a gas fire, a rat bite, and demonic possession, all while praying to Fortuna. And this is the civilization everyone points to as the height of ancient sanitation.
The engineering was real. The experience was horror-comedy.
The medieval period is where the stereotype gets in the way. We all have the image of the chamber pot emptied out the upstairs window onto the street. The historians are now saying that's mostly wrong.
Katherine Weikert's line is good. We like to think of the Middle Ages as being filthy, but people were cognisant that faeces and urine needed to be somewhere else. Towns had bylaws banning waste in public roads. A typical medieval toilet was not too dissimilar to an outhouse, a seat over a pit or a cess, sometimes timber or stone lined.
The castle garderobe is the fancy version. A stone chamber built into the exterior wall with a shaft down to a moat or pit. The draught carried the smell down. And the wealthy hung their clothes in there because the smell kept moths and bugs away.
Which is a sentence that only makes sense if you accept that the medieval rich smelled like a garderobe and considered it a feature.
The monasteries were the real innovators. Cistercian monasteries like Rievaulx Abbey built long rows of latrine seats above a continuously flowing stream. That's a communal flush system, centuries before anyone put a tank on a bowl.
And the medical thinking of the time connected foul air to disease, the miasma theory. So people were advised to face into the wind while relieving themselves. Which is practical advice if you think about it, wrong theory, right instinct.
The cesspits are where the archaeology gets unexpectedly good. A ninth century cesspit in Southampton yielded a silver Umayyad coin from Córdoba, Islamic Spain. A very valuable coin that travelled from Spain to England just to end up dropped in a toilet.
Weikert's line on that is perfect. People dropped things in the toilets, just like we drop our phones in the toilet today. That phenomenon is more than a thousand years old.
The York poo is the other one. A ninth century Viking coprolite from Jórvík that showed a diet of bread and meat plus intestinal worms and possible anaemia. One fossilized turd and you can reconstruct a man's health and dinner.
Which is the thing about cesspits. They're time capsules. Trade routes, diet, disease, what people ate and what ate them. All preserved in the worst possible medium.
And then there are the people who had to clean them. This is where the grim part stops being funny.
Gong farmers. The word gong comes from Old English gang, meaning to go, and it meant both a privy and its contents. In Tudor England, a gong farmer was someone who dug excrement out of privies and cesspits. They could only work at night, nine at night to five in the morning, hence the name nightmen.
At Hampton Court under Elizabeth the First, they earned sixpence a day. That was a good living. But the job description was spending your working life up to your knees, waist, even neck in human ordure.
And the deaths. In thirteen twenty five, a gong farmer named Richard the Raker fell into a cesspit whose rotted ceiling gave way and drowned in feces. That's not a metaphor. He drowned.
They employed young boys to work in confined spaces because the boys were small enough to fit. The asphyxiation risk was constant. The gases in a sealed cesspit could kill you before you knew anything was wrong.
Late fifteenth century gong farmers charged two shillings per ton of waste removed. Cesspits needed clearing roughly every two years. London had sixteen public latrines for a population of thirty thousand by the end of the fourteenth century. Sixteen.
Do the math on that. Thirty thousand people, sixteen public toilets. Most people were using a private cesspit or a chamber pot or just... wherever they could.
The waste went to laystalls on the town edges. Much of London's went to Thames-side dumps like Dung Wharf, later the site of the Mermaid Theatre. Mount Pleasant in Clerkenwell covered seven and a half acres by seventeen eighty. An entire hill made of human waste.
There's a punishment story that sticks with me. A London gong farmer who poured effluent down a drain was put in one of his own pipes, filled to the neck with gong, and publicly displayed in Golden Lane with a sign detailing his crime.
The punishment matched the crime with a precision that modern sentencing guidelines would find excessive.
Night soil was also an economy. In China and Japan, where cattle manure was scarce, human waste was the fertilizer. In Edo, compost merchants bought feces from apartment owners. Rich people's excreta sold for more because their diet was better.
The Chinese euphemism is beautiful. Empting nocturnal fragrance.
And this is the part where the past refuses to stay past. Manual scavenging was banned in India by the nineteen ninety three Act. But the National Human Rights Commission observed in twenty twenty one that eradication is far from over. Government data shows nine hundred seventy one people died cleaning sewers and septic tanks between nineteen ninety three and twenty twenty one.
North Korea still uses night soil as fertilizer due to shortages. So the job of the gong farmer is not a historical curiosity. It's a current event in some places.
Which reframes Daniel's whole premise. A basic modern toilet is a palace compared to most of history. But for a lot of people alive right now, the palace is still out of reach.
The flush toilet itself is a story of fits and starts. Sir John Harington, godson of Elizabeth the First, published a book in fifteen ninety six describing a flushing device that needed seven and a half gallons of water and could serve up to twenty people before flushing. He installed one for the Queen at Richmond.
Twenty people before flushing. That's a very different definition of flush than the one we use.
And then Thomas Crapper, the man everyone thinks invented the flush toilet, did not invent the flush toilet. The myth comes from a nineteen sixty nine tongue in cheek biography by Wallace Reyburn. Crapper held nine patents, four for drains, three for water closets, one for manhole covers, one for pipe joints. He improved the S-bend and U-bend trap around eighteen eighty. But Alexander Cummings invented the S-bend in seventeen seventy five.
So Crapper was a real plumber with real patents, and his name became a joke that then became a fake fact. The name made the myth stick.
The S-bend is the actual hero. It's the water trap that keeps sewer gas out of the room. Before that, a toilet was just a hole with a pipe, and the pipe was a highway for smells and rats and, in one Roman case, an octopus.
Aelian tells of a giant octopus that swam up a house drain in Puteoli each night to eat pickled fish from the pantry. The sewer opening had no trap, so the octopus just... commuted.
That's the thing about the trap. It's invisible and unglamorous, but it's the difference between a toilet and a hole in the floor. The flush is nice, the porcelain is nice, but the water trap is what makes the room livable.
The Great Stink is the moment the whole problem became impossible to ignore. London in eighteen fifty eight. Hot weather, the Thames low, raw sewage baking on the banks. Parliament's river-side curtains were soaked in lime chloride. Disraeli called the Thames a Stygian pool, reeking with ineffable and intolerable horrors.
Queen Victoria and Prince Albert cut short a Thames pleasure cruise because of the smell. Michael Faraday wrote to The Times that the whole river was for the time a real sewer. The Illustrated London News ran a line that still stings. We can colonise the remotest ends of the earth, but we cannot clean the River Thames.
London had two hundred thousand cesspits and three hundred sixty sewers at that point. Some cesspits leaked methane that caught fire and exploded. The city was sitting on a pressurized sea of its own waste.
And cholera kept killing. Eighteen thirty one, six thousand five hundred thirty six dead. Eighteen forty eight to forty nine, fourteen thousand one hundred thirty seven. Eighteen fifty three to fifty four, ten thousand seven hundred thirty eight. And then eighteen sixty six, five thousand five hundred ninety six in the East End, in an area not yet connected to the new sewer system.
John Snow's Broad Street pump work in eighteen fifty four established water-borne transmission. The science was there. The political will was the missing ingredient.
The Great Stink provided the will. Parliament couldn't sit in a building next to a river that smelled like an open sewer. So they funded Joseph Bazalgette's system. Eleven hundred miles of street sewers feeding eighty two miles of main interconnecting sewers, built between eighteen fifty nine and eighteen seventy five, at a final cost of about six and a half million pounds, using three hundred eighteen million bricks.
Three hundred eighteen million bricks. That's a number that sounds made up until you look at the embankments.
The Victoria, Chelsea and Albert Embankments are literally the sewer system wearing a nice suit. The land was reclaimed to house the sewers, and the embankments are the top surface. The system still operates, serving eight to nine million people.
The life expectancy numbers are the real argument. Liverpool before sewers, life expectancy was nineteen years. After James Newlands' programme, it more than doubled. Frankfurt's typhoid death rate fell from eighty to ten per hundred thousand after its sewer system.
John Doxat said Bazalgette probably did more good and saved more lives than any single Victorian official. And the man was building drains. That's the unglamorous truth. The sewer did more for public health than most medicines.
Which brings us back to Daniel's framing. The basic modern toilet is a palace. But the palace wasn't built by toilet designers. It was built by sewer engineers. The bowl is just the visible tip of an invisible system.
And the system is the achievement. The flush toilet is a user interface for a sewage network. The network is what changed life expectancy. The porcelain is what changed the experience.
The Indus Valley had the network without the porcelain. Rome had the porcelain without the network. London had neither until it had both. The modern toilet is the moment those two things finally fused.
And the fusion is recent. A hundred fifty years ago, most of London was still on cesspits. A hundred years before that, the city was drowning in its own filth. The palace is brand new.
The myths are worth naming. Medieval people didn't routinely dump chamber pots out windows. Thomas Crapper didn't invent the flush toilet. Roman sewers weren't waste removal systems. And the Indus Valley had flush toilets four and a half thousand years ago. The story is not a clean line from filth to porcelain.
It's a loop. Technologies appear, work, vanish, get reinvented. The water trap appears in seventeen seventy five, but the Minoans had covered drains three thousand years earlier. The flush appears in fifteen ninety six, but Harappa had it in twenty six hundred BCE.
What's new is the scale. Bazalgette's system serving nine million people is a different thing from a palace latrine. The modern achievement is not the toilet, it's the network that makes the toilet boring.
Boring is the goal. A toilet that works is a toilet you don't think about. The moment you're thinking about the toilet, something has gone wrong.
And most of human history was spent thinking about the toilet. Where to put it, how to empty it, who to pay to dig it out, whether the rats would bite, whether the gas would explode, whether the demon would get you.
The modern toilet is a palace because it's unremarkable. That's the whole trick. You walk in, you flush, you leave, and nothing happens. No smell, no rats, no gas, no demon. The absence of event is the luxury.
Hilbert: I lost four hundred pounds on a toilet once.
Go on.
Hilbert: Nineteen eighty seven. I was doing building maintenance for a firm in Manchester, and the owner decided to put fancy toilets in the office block. Imported from Italy. Marbled, bidet attached, the works. Four hundred pounds each, which was a month's rent for some people. First week, one of them cracked. Hairline fracture in the bowl. The supplier said it was installation error. The plumber said it was a flaw in the casting. Nobody paid me.
So you ate the cost.
Hilbert: I ate the cost. The owner kept the cracked one in the lobby for six months as a warning to the other toilets. I still think about that four hundred pounds every time I see a marble bathroom. It's a palace until it breaks, and then it's just a very expensive bucket.
The Indus Valley version would have been repairable with a brick and some mortar. The modern one needs a specialist and a parts catalogue.
Hilbert: That's the thing about palaces. They're lovely until the plumbing fails, and then you're back to the cesspit, just with better lighting.
The cracked bowl in the lobby is a very specific kind of British revenge.
Hilbert: He was a specific kind of British man. The toilets outlasted him, the office block got sold, and I never got my four hundred pounds. But I did learn to read a casting seam. You can tell a lot about a toilet from the seam.
That's the detail that doesn't make the history books. The people who installed and repaired these things had a whole body of knowledge about how they failed.
Hilbert: The trap is the part that goes first. People think the bowl cracks, but it's usually the trap. Hairline crack in the S-bend, and you get sewer gas seeping into the room, and everyone blames the drains. I'd take the trap out and hold it up to the light, and there it was, a crack you couldn't see until you looked.
So the water trap is the hero and the weak point at the same time.
Hilbert: Everything important is. The thing that protects you is the thing that breaks. I've got a box of old traps in the shed. Can't bring myself to throw them out.
The S-bend is a piece of shaped ceramic that changed public health more than most people appreciate.
Hilbert: The Romans had the right idea with the communal sponge. At least when that broke, you just got a new sponge. Now you need a plumber and a second mortgage.
The Roman sponge was shared between strangers. I'm not sure that's the right idea.
Hilbert: I didn't say it was a good idea. I said it was the right idea for the time. Everything's the right idea for the time until it isn't.
The time part is what I keep coming back to. The Indus Valley had the right idea four and a half thousand years ago, and then the time changed and the idea vanished. The Victorians had the right idea, and it stuck because the time was ready for it.
Hilbert: The time was ready because the smell got bad enough. That's the real driver. Nobody builds a sewer because they want to. They build it because the alternative becomes unbearable.
The Great Stink as a business case.
Hilbert: The smell got into Parliament, and suddenly there was money for bricks. Three hundred eighteen million of them. Before that, the money wasn't there because the smell was someone else's problem.
That's the political economy of sanitation in one sentence. The people with power only act when the problem reaches them.
Hilbert: The people without power just live with it. Or die with it. Nine hundred seventy one people cleaning sewers in India since nineteen ninety three. That's the same job as Richard the Raker, same risk, same lack of anyone caring until it's too late.
The past isn't past for everyone.
Hilbert: No. For some people, the palace is still a long way off. And the people who build the palace are the ones who never get to live in it.
The cutting room floor detail I wanted to get in is the medieval medical advice to face into the wind while relieving yourself. It's based on the miasma theory, which was wrong about disease, but the instinct was right. If the smell is bad, don't breathe it. The theory was wrong, the practice was sound.
The open question I'm left with is whether the Indus Valley system was a breakthrough or a stinking disaster, to borrow Ratnagar's framing. The drains exist. The inspection holes exist. But we don't actually know how well it worked day to day. Maybe it was a palace. Maybe it was a palace that smelled like a sewer.
The truth is probably both. A palace with a smell problem is still a palace compared to a ditch. But the smell problem is what reminds you that the palace is built on pipes.
Thanks to our producer Hilbert Flumingtop for keeping the show running, and for the four hundred pound toilet story.
This has been My Weird Prompts, the human-AI collaboration podcast. If you want to send us your own weird prompt, email us at show at my weird prompts dot com.
We'll be back soon.
