Woman using chamber pot (Athens, Greece, ca. 480 BC. Now in Berlin)
Where did people go to the bathroom?
Imagine if you had to leave your house and walk to a nearby field or forest every time you wanted to go to the bathroom, even if it was raining or in the middle of the night! That’s what people did when they first started living in houses. In North America, central Africa, and Central Asia, where there weren’t too many people, they kept right on going out to the fields until modern times.
West Asian sewage
Greek fountains and sewage
Roman toilets and sewers
China’s water and sewage
What is a chamber pot?
Child’s high chair/potty seat (Athens, ca. 580 BC)
But in places where people began to live closer together, in larger villages, they found another way – they used chamber pots. This might seem yucky to you, but imagine what a great new technology it must have seemed like to kids who were used to having to go outside in the cold and dark when they had to go.
More about potty seats
Most chamber pots were made of clay pottery, which was a new invention about the time that people began to live in villages. Pottery was a good thing to make chamber pots out of because pottery was cheap and it was waterproof.
History of pottery
Stone Age China
Chamber pot from China (ca. 300 AD)
When you needed to go to the bathroom, you just pulled the chamber pot out of the cupboard or from under the bed, and used that.
Where did you empty chamber pots?
In the morning, you could carry the chamber pot out to the field and dump it out there (or, if you had enslaved servants, you made them empty the chamber pots).
History of slavery
If you lived in an apartment building in the city, you emptied your chamber pot into a barrel on the ground floor – or, if you felt lazy, you just dumped it out the window into the street!
Roman apartment buildings
Medieval chamber pot from York, England
What is night soil?
In the morning, people came by with carts or wheelbarrows or buckets on long poles and collected the “night soil” (the poop) and took it out to the country to compost it into fertilizer for farmers to buy.
What is dysentery?
What’s cholera?
Who invented wheelbarrows?
Sewage and fertilizer
It’s risky to use human poop as fertilizer for vegetables and grain, because dangerous disease germs like cholera and dysentery in your poop can get on the food you eat, and then a lot more people will catch the disease. But in the ancient world, people didn’t know that, and until the invention of modern fertilizers made from oil, farmers needed human fertilizer anyway in order to grow food.
Dear Sir.
I am a professor at Meiji University in Japan specializing in building equipment. I’m writing a trap and drainage system and I’d love to post a picture of the “Medieval chamber pot” on your blog.
Best regards,
Kyosuke Sakaue
Professor, D.Eng.
Dept. of Architecture, School of Science and Technology, Meiji University
1-1-1, Higashimita, Tama-ku, Kawasaki City, Kanagawa 214-8571 Japan
Phone/Fax +81 44 934 7380, e-mail：[email protected]
That pot is here: Yorkshire Museum collection – ref.1992.69 – you should ask them for permission to publish.