History of Sanitation

HISTORY OF SANITATION 31 bath resembling a modern Turkish bath and provided with bitumen floor, sloping to one corner, emptied its waste water into one. The toilets in the private houses of 6,000 years ago were almost identical with those of the modern Arab house—a small oblong hole in the floor, without a seat. Several found in Bismya were provided with vertical drains beneath. “ In clearing out the drains a few of them whose open- ings had been exposed were filled with the drifting sand. Others were half full of the filth of long past ages. In one at the temple we removed dozens of shallow terra cotta drinking cups not unlike a large saucer in shape and size. Evidently it received the waste water of the drinking foun- tain and the cups had accidentally dropped within. “In the Bismyatemple platform, constructed about 2750 b. c., we discovered a horizontal drain of tile, each of which was about 3 feet long and 6 inches in diameter and not unlike in shape those at present employed. It conducted the rain water from the platform to one of the vertical drains. One tile was so well constructed that for a long time it served as a chimney for our house, until my Turkish overseer suggested that its dark, smoked end project from the battlements of the house to convince the Arabs that we were well fortified; thus it served as a gun until the close of the excavations.” The first sewers of Rome ware built between 800 and 735 b. c., and therefore antedate the first aqueduct by be- tween 440 and 487 years. It is evident, therefore, that as originally planned the sew- ers of Rome were intended to carry- off the surface water and in other ways serve to drain the site of the ancient city. Indeed, the The Cloaca Maxima. From an old woodcut