How People Actually Went to the Toilet in Ancient Cities
Picture this: you are walking down a bustling, sun-baked street in ancient Rome or medieval London. The air doesn’t smell like coffee or fresh bread. Instead, it hits you like a physical wall—a suffocating cocktail of raw sewage, unwashed bodies, and organic waste piled high in the alleyways. You feel a sudden, unmistakable rumble in your stomach. Panic sets in. In our modern world, you would just duck into the nearest cafe, find a clean tiled room, and scroll through your phone in peace. But back then? You were entirely on your own, facing a daily sanitation reality that would make any modern person faint on the spot.
Let’s be completely honest: history books love to talk about grand marble palaces, heroic emperors, and brilliant philosophers, but they conveniently skip over the most fundamental, messy human problem of all—what did billions of people actually do when nature called?
1. Ancient Rome: Shoulder-to-Shoulder Communal Latrines
We’ve all heard the myth that Rome was an absolute paradise of plumbing. Sure, the wealthy had private setups, and the city boasted miles of legendary aqueducts. But for many residents living in crowded apartment buildings known as insulae, life was entirely different. When you needed to go, public latrines—known as foricae—were one of the available options.
Imagine walking into a long marble room with a row of bench seats carved with holes, sitting shoulder-to-shoulder with strangers. There were no private stalls or individual doors. You sat knee-to-knee with your neighbors, casually discussing trade prices or political gossip while doing your business over an open trench of rushing water. In some of these facilities, a sponge on a stick known as a tersorium was made available, which could be rinsed in water or vinegar between uses. It was communal, public, and utterly devoid of personal privacy.
2. Medieval Europe: Chamber Pots and Alleyway Realities
Fast forward a few centuries to medieval European cities, and urban sanitation took a terrifying nosedive. As cities became intensely overcrowded behind protective stone walls, municipal plumbing practically vanished. Most ordinary townspeople relied on simple chamber pots kept right under their beds.
When morning rolled around, dealing with the contents was a daily chore. In some European cities, household and human waste could end up in streets or drainage gutters, despite local municipal rules and ordinances intended to curb illegal dumping. While popular history loves to picture people shouting “Gardyloo!” before throwing waste out of windows, that phrase was specifically a later Scottish custom associated with cities like Edinburgh rather than a universal medieval European routine. If you lived inside a stone castle, you might use a garderobe—a small structural alcove or stone chute jutting out over the wall that discharged waste into cesspits, drains, or external areas below, managing refuse as best as engineering allowed.
3. Indus Valley Civilization: The Underrated Kings of Ancient Pipes
Before you think every ancient human lived in total filth, we have to give massive credit where credit is due. Long before the Romans built their famous systems, the brilliant urban planners of the Indus Valley Civilization—in major ancient hubs like Harappa and Mohenjo-Daro—figured out sanitation better than European cities managed three thousand years later.
Around 2500 BCE, many houses in the Indus Valley featured dedicated bathing and toilet areas connected to drains, soak jars, or cesspits, while the broader city engineered sophisticated, covered terracotta drainage channels running beneath the paved streets. Wastewater flowed smoothly away from residential zones into centralized containment systems. It was clean, efficient, and brilliantly organized. Yet many later cities across the globe would struggle for millennia to match that level of urban engineering.
4. Edo Period Japan: The Profitable Business of Nightsoil
While various parts of the world struggled with waste disposal, Edo-period Japan (1603–1868) looked at human refuse and saw pure economic value. Modern synthetic chemical fertilizers didn’t exist yet, so agricultural communities relied heavily on organic alternatives to keep their soil fertile.
In densely populated urban centers like Edo (modern-day Tokyo), human excrement—locally known as “nightsoil”—was considered a prized commodity. Landlords and homeowners actually sold their tenants’ waste to specialized collectors who came around with wooden buckets. Farmers were willing to pay real money for valuable nightsoil, and competition for good-quality fertilizer could be intense. It was an entirely circular, highly organized urban economy where nothing went to waste, turning a universal human problem into a thriving agricultural asset.
Conclusion: A Reason to Appreciate Modern Plumbing
When you look back at how our ancestors managed the most basic call of nature, it gives you a profound, almost spiritual appreciation for indoor plumbing, toilet paper, and municipal sewage treatment plants. Next time you sit down in your private bathroom with your smartphone, take a second to silently thank modern engineering. Because surviving a day in an ancient city required an iron stomach, nerves of steel, and a very strong constitution.