Toilet develops swiftly from Cloaca Maxima to luxury cabins

Any civilization begins with a sewage system. Toilet was invented many centuries ago, which makes it very difficult to say where exactly the first toilet appeared on the planet.

	Toilet develops swiftly from Cloaca Maxima to luxury cabins
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Most likely, the first toilet was built on the island of Crete long before Christ. Inhabitants of Crete used to build inner water drain toilets. They looked like stone toilet seats complete with a complex pipe system to supply water. The Queen of Crete is believed to have invented such toilets 3,800 years ago. She sat down near a stream to relieve herself and afterwards saw that everything she was so eager to lose was floating away.

The prototype of modern toilet appeared in Mesopotamia about 3,000 years before Christ. Sewerage existed in ancient Egypt. Archeologists uncovered sewage canals, the age of which is over 2500 years, and a toilet seat from Tel-el-Amarna which dates back to 1350 BC. Much the same ancient toilet seat goes back to the Mohenjo-daro civilization (in 2500 BC on the territory of modern-day Pakistan). This brick construction with a toilet seat is connected with the underground deck drain system. More advanced underground systems of rainfall and domestic waste gutters existed in Babylon, Carthage, Jerusalem and Athens. An excavation site in China unveiled a stone seat with armrests and a toilet tank that would be filled with water (206 BC – 24 AD).

The most famous cesspool in the world – the Cloaca Maxima – was built in Rome. It was build in VII-VI centuries BC and reached five meters wide. For many centuries long this system remained the most impeccable one. The history of sewerage gives an account of luxurious toilets which served as places of meetings and conversations to the murmur of draining streams. Even the tax on latrines (public lavatories) approved in the first century by Emperor Vespasian could not prevent the toilet development. It was the tax that enriched the world vocabulary with the expression “Money has no smell” (Pecunia non olet). As to the territory of the modern EU, the first toilet was mentioned in the Icelandic sage of the 11^th century. Iceland is known to be a pagan country, and Christianity did not root itself there.

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