What Did Ancient Humans Use For Toilet Paper?

What did people use instead of toilet paper? Seashells, tapestries, wooden sticks and more.

Transcript

00:00 What did ancient humans use to wipe after going to the bathroom?

00:05 Throughout history, people have used everything from their own hands to corn cobs to snow

00:11 to clean up after bowel movements.

00:13 Most of the material we don't have because it's organic or just disappeared,

00:18 according to Susan Morrison, a medieval literature professor at Texas State University.

00:23 However, experts have been able to recover some samples.

00:27 Some even had traces of feces and depictions of toilet paper's precursors in art and literature.

00:34 One of the oldest materials on record for this purpose were wooden or bamboo sticks

00:39 wrapped in cloth called hygiene sticks, dating back to 2,000 years ago in China.

00:44 From 332 BC to 642 AD, during the Greco-Roman period, another stick was used called a tesorium,

00:53 which had a sea sponge on the end and was left in public bathrooms for communal use.

00:58 However, it's also possible that these weren't used to clean people's behinds, but the bathrooms themselves.

01:04 Either way, tesoriums were cleaned by dumping them in a bucket of salt or vinegar water.

01:10 Greeks and Romans also wiped with flat, disc-shaped ceramics called poissoi.

01:16 Archaeologists have found these relics with traces of feces on them,

01:20 as well as an ancient wine cup featuring a man wiping his bum with poissoi.

01:25 The abrasive characteristics of ceramics suggest that long-term use of poissoi

01:30 could have resulted in local irritation, skin, or mucosal damage,

01:34 or complications of external hemorrhoids, according to the British Medical Journal.

01:40 In the 8th century AD, the Japanese used another type of wooden stick called chugi

01:45 to clean both the outside and inside of the anus, likely putting a stick up there.

01:52 In the Middle Ages, people also used moss, sedge, hay, straw, and pieces of tapestry.

01:58 Granted, nowadays not everyone uses toilet paper.

02:02 Water, such as a gentle stream from a bidet, keeps many people's undersides clean the world over.

02:09 [Music]

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