Egyptian Toilets
Muhamed Aly Bedouin village, Dahab, Sinai Peninsula, Egypt.
This is a classic floor-mounted squatter with integrated plumbing.
The shower head mounts on the wall of the room, and the toilet drains the entire room. The hose/sprayer also reaches the toilet itself for hygenic purposes.
This is excellent by Egyptian standards, but then it's in Sinai and not along the Nile. By the way, Dahab is on the beach, and that's sand you see there!
This pit toilet has been constructed from local loose stones, just below the summit of Mount Sinai, Egypt.
It's not actually from the era of Moses, 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'd think that during close to 1,700 years they'd 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.
- See pictures of my trip to Egypt for much more on Mount Sinai and Egypt in general.
- Also compare this to the pit toilet in the Besparmak Daglari of Turkey.
- This one is also filed under Biblical Toilets, Old Testament.
- Also see the Loos With Views page
This squat toilet is found on board the Egyptian passenger train on Aswan-Luxor-Cairo route paralleling the Nile.
Although this was an express train, and thus far superior to local service, there was something dreadfully wrong here.
No Egyptian train toilet is supposed to be this clean!
This toilet is on an Egyptian ferry on Nuweiba-Aqaba route between the Sinai and Jordan.
It has no sprayer, but at least there's a hose.
This is actually pretty nice by Egyptian public toilet standards.
And I must emphasize that it's rust you see there!
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.
The Porcelain God: A Social History of the Toilet, by Julie Horan, contends that civilization began with the toilet.
Toilet: Public Restrooms and the Politics of Sharing, edited by Laura Noren and Harvey Molotch, has essays by anthropologists, sociologists, and architects on the importance of the toilet, especially for urban dwellers.
Latrinae Et Foricae: Toilets in the Roman World describes the toilets of the Roman Empire from Iberia to Syria, and from North Africa to Hadrian's Wall in Britannia.
Toilets, Bathtubs, Sinks, and Sewers: A History of the Bathroom, explains the history of personal cleanliness and hygiene to children in grades 5-8.
| A Sani-Flush blue border indicates a toilet that I've used. |
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.
In December, 2010 I registered the toilet-guru.com domain and moved the pages to a dedicated server.
If you're not bored yet, you might be interested in (or at least tolerate):
