Biblical Toilets, Old Testament
Pit toilet constructed from local rubble, just below the summit of Mt Sinai, Egypt.
This toilet is not actually from the era of Moses himself, thought to be approximately 1450 BC, but the mountain has been a major pilgrimage site at least since when the Byzantine Empress Helena (ruled 313-328 AD) established a monastery at the base of the mountain.
You would think that during close to 1,700 years they would have had time to put doors and a roof on the thing!
And yes, the sani-flush blue background does indicate that that I have used this toilet, just as it means on all my other pages.
Also compare this to the pit toilet in the Besparmak Daglari of Turkey.
See pictures of my trip to Egypt for much more on Mount Sinai and Egypt in general.
Also see the toiletological signage page for some Old Testament toiletological references.
Rose George's The Big Necessity: The Unmentionable World of Human Waste and Why It Matters is a fascinating description of sanitation conditions around the world. "2.6 billion people don't have sanitation. [....] Four in ten people have no access to any latrine, toilet, bucket, or box."
In September 2009, Morna Gregory and Sian James published a book titled Toilets of the World. It's pretty much the same theme that you find here — photographs and commentary on other people's plumbing.
| A Sani-Flush blue border indicates a toilet that I've used. |
How long have my Toilets of the World pages been around? I'm not exactly sure, although they started in the mid 1990s as a single page on a Purdue University server. The Internet Archive Wayback Machine lets you see what that looked like as far back as January 17, 1999.
My cromwell-intl.com domain appeared in September, 2001, although the Wayback Machine didn't notice its one enormous Toilet of the World page until January 17, 2002. Some time soon after that I split it into categories, and the collection has grown ever since.
If you're not bored yet, you might be interested in (or at least tolerate):
