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.
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A Sani-Flush blue border indicates a toilet that I've used.
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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):
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