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Here's a short article about how the Romans would use public bathrooms:What the Romans Used for Toilet PaperEssentially, it would be a discrete affair, despite the fact that you could be sitting right next to your neighbor while on the pot. The most disgusting thing about this is obviously the sponge which would be used as a form of communal toilet paper.While researching Pompeian houses last year I read an article about bathrooms in that ancient city. One bathroom - which must have been inside a private house rather than in a public location - was configured so that the floor that the toilet was on slanted downward slightly so that after a person did his or her thing, it could be "flushed". At the base of the toilet was an opening. Flushing consisted of taking a bucket of water and emptying it onto the floor, which would then flow downward, through the opening at the toilet base, and all the excrement would be washed into some sort of piping or septic system of some sort. Going to the bathroom would have been one of the most common of tasks in Rome, yet one which most people probably overlook in their history books.
Barbaric romans !!At least, during the Middle Ages, chamber pots were thrown through the window straight in the street below, hence the expression (in French) : "tenir le haut du pav?" - "to stay on the upper side of the pavement" (to be on top). Civilisation was in progress !
I will make but two comments.1. The Roman doesnt sound too bad to me. My dad told me before my first deployment that the sign of a real man is he can (being coy) do #2 in the middle of a busy camp and not worry about someone watching when he wipes. That actusally happens on deployments. We had urine tubes(not their real name) and burn out latrines for # 2. the Tubes were simply camo net poles, which are hollow, stuck into the a gravel filled hole at an angle with the opening at a comfortable height for urination. Burn-out latrines can be seen in the movie Platoon and we still make them the same way they did during the Vietnam war. They are hygienic but smell horrible and burning the accumulated waste is not a pleasant task, hence the origin of the military term s@#% detail for any unpleasant duty one must perform while in the military. We used both kinds in Bosnia and Iraq.2. As for the Muslim solution, suffice it to say that it is probably even more disgusting than you might think. If you ever have to visit an Arab country, step lightly or you might break through into an old latrine pit because they move their toilets when they get full and only barely cover the old pits with dirt. Didn't happen to me, but to one of my soldiers. He bore a hilarious (to us) moniker for the rest of our deployment. Probably his worst six-moths in the army even without getting shot at.
Barbaric romans !!At least, during the Middle Ages, chamber pots were thrown through the window straight in the street below, hence the expression (in French) : "tenir le haut du pav?" - "to stay on the upper side of the pavement" (to be on top). Civilisation was in progress !
I just saw your images. The engraving is interesting....I had known about the emptying of the chamber pot but hadn't seen it in images. Do you have the source for the image? I might want to look at it sometime. And the second image is quite interesting. Notice how there's a vertical mark going down from the upstairs loo which suggests that it was covered in doo doo, so much so that it caused the weathering of the brick to be different from the rest of the wall.
About the engraving, it is used in different sources : - Toilets of the World by Morna E. Gregory & Sian James http://stormpoo.com/index.php?/about/2/ - http://www.peartree-miniatures.co.uk/topic.html I've found another one here : http://www.shakespeares-sonnets.com/TofdayB1.htm
