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In the 1920s, archaeologists excavated an honest-to-god lost civilization.
A century before, a deserter from the British East India Company’s army had stumbled across seemingly ancient ruins in modern-day Pakistan; it soon became clear that there were a number of very old cities in the region, many partially buried by the shifting paths of the region’s rivers. There had been an ancient civilization here, something contemporary with and on the scale of ancient Mesopotamia or Egypt.
Though a few scholars were intrigued, it took a long time for serious archaeologists to investigate the sites (partially because archaeology was still developing into a real academic discipline). In fact, for much of the nineteenth century, people looted the ruins for building materials. It wasn’t until the early 1900s that the British rulers of India officially protected the ancient sites and undertook serious excavation. The early digs focused on two of the ancient Indus Civilization’s most important cities: Harappa and Mohenjo-Daro.
Mohenjo-Daro — a modern Urdu name literally meaning “mound of the dead men” — was revealed to be an extensive urban area that housed perhaps 40,000 people. We don’t know much about the people who lived there because we can’t read their writing, but the city seems different from other ancient urban areas in several ways. First, it didn’t have obvious temples or palaces, a fact that has led historians to sometimes wonder whether this society was egalitarian.
Also, the area seems to have been more centrally planned than other ancient societies, with several large public places for communal use. One of these is a sunken area with stairs on either side; the floor angles toward a drain, and the walls and floor are made of tightly sealed bricks.
It’s essentially a swimming pool. Historians gave it a grander name: “The Great Bath” of Mohenjo-Daro.
Nobody quite knows what this so-called “bath” was for. Scholars usually say that it served a religious purpose, that “it suggests an ideology based on cleanliness” or that it was a place of ritual purification. But, honestly, nobody knows what this water tank, the oldest in the world, was for.
Perhaps the residents of this ancient city did perform religious purification rituals there. Maybe the Indus people just really liked to swim. Or maybe it’s just one of the oldest artifacts of humanity’s desire to get clean by taking a scrub in the tub.
Many animals spend a lot of their time cleaning themselves — my cat cleans herself with her tongue for hours each day, elephants splash around in rivers, and rabbits roll in the dust to free themselves of parasites. Even ants clean their antennae, licking them and pulling them through a bundle of tiny hairs. Humans are no different. Bathing habits have fluctuated throughout history, but humans have always had a desire to get clean.
One of the oldest personal bathtubs — the so-called “queen’s bathtub” — was found in Crete, at the Minoan palace in Knossos. It’s about 1500 years old:
This tradition continued into the later classical period, with Greek people using smaller personal bathtubs, often too small to actually get your whole body into:
People in the ancient Mediterranean didn’t just use water to clean themselves — they also used olive oil. Sometimes, they would apply oil to their skin after bathing. Other times, especially after exercise, men would slather on oil and perhaps something abrasive, like sand, before bathing (sometimes they would apply it before beginning exercise as a sort of primitive sunblock) and then scrape it off with a special tool called a strigil. Though this was a mundane activity, it was considered important enough to be represented in some remarkable artwork:
Here’s a closeup of a Roman strigil, designed to hook around the limbs and channel off the grime:
This Greek one is a little bigger and more elaborate:
The Romans, by the way, weren’t the only culture to include vigorous scraping as part of their bathing customs. Archaeologists have found medieval Persian scraping tools in abundance. Persians would spend a long time in hot baths, which would release dead skin. Then they’d scrape off the unwanted stuff with one of these guys:
What I love about these Persian scrapers is that they are unnecessarily elaborate. The plain side was used for the actual abrasion, but the other side is carved into a nifty design, each one unique:
I enjoy these little lions, who seem to be giving each other a high five:
Though bathing was a private affair in some places, other ancient and medieval societies turned it into a communal event. This was both out of necessity and choice. It was, of course, easier to collect and heat large quantities of water in centralized locations than to do so in each person’s individual home. But many societies also turned communal bathing into an elaborate, pleasurable ritual.
The most famous of these public baths were in the Roman Empire, and they were quite an operation. One of the bath complexes at Pompeii had over a dozen rooms:
Here’s a later artist’s imagining of such a facility:
These baths tended to consist of (at least) a warm room, a hot room, and a cold room. Some baths included sauna-like hot rooms as well as steam rooms. Bathing could take hours — a long, leisurely, social process where people of all classes could mingle in intimate conditions. An afternoon at the baths might also include exercise at a nearby palaestrum or time spent appreciating the art that often adorned the finest baths.
The Baths of Caracalla in Rome were even more elaborate:
Though the Baths of Caracalla are now mostly ruins, sixteenth-century popes excavated some of the artwork and placed it in a museum. These artworks included the largest single sculpture group that we have from the ancient world (now in Naples):
And this bathtub, now part of a fountain in a Roman piazza:
Wealthy Romans might avail themselves of the public baths several times a week. This mosaic from a Roman bath complex in Libya says it all — above ancient flip-flops and strigils, the text translates to: “Bathing is good for you!”
The Islamic world adopted the Roman practice of public bathing, building hammams throughout the Middle East (the Persian scrapers above were from a hammam). These baths were often romanticized by nineteenth-century Orientalist artists like Jean-Leon Gerome:
But the images we have of them from the time (like this Persian drawing from the 1500s) are a little less lascivious:
Medieval Europeans, despite their reputation as a filthy society, also bathed pretty regularly, often in public baths that were located near bakeries (so that they could use the waste heat from the ovens to warm up the water. Here’s a European bath depicted by Albrecht Durer (apparently you could chug a beer while bathing — very efficient!):
Japanese culture also developed a tradition of public bathing that dates back to the Middle Ages. These bathhouses were less elaborate than some of the more elaborate Roman and Middle Eastern ones. Perhaps this has to do with their origins — they were first attached to Buddhist monasteries and reserved for the monks, but eventually opened to the general public. Utagawa Toyokuni captured an eighteenth-century scene of women and a child at one:
Bathing became a predominantly private activity only after it went out of fashion almost entirely.
In America and much of Europe by the 1700s, many people believed that submerging yourself in water was bad for your health. There was some reason for this — water wasn’t always clean, and the global cholera outbreaks of the early 1800s only reinforced people’s fear of the water supply. Some people bathed fully clothed, while others like Ben Franklin preferred an “air bath.”
Bathing came back into vogue after women’s writers like Catherine Beecher and Lydia Maria Child encouraged cleanliness. Child wrote:
Wash your whole person thoroughly once or twice a week; and wash yourself with a coarse crash towel, or brush, till the surface glows. ..If done at night, it is apt to induce refreshing sleep.
Middle-class people began to install bathtubs in their homes by the late nineteenth century, although people who lived in tenements didn’t have access to private bathing. Progressive reformers established public bathing facilities in many American cities during the first half of the twentieth century. They weren’t all that fancy, as we can see in this Lewis Hine photo from 1910:
Or this photo from New York City in 1908:
You may notice that this looks a lot like a swimming pool. In fact, many early American swimming pools weren’t primarily for recreation — they were established as a way to make sure that working-class people stayed clean.
But, over time, almost all residences in America got a bathroom. Bathing became something done primarily in private. Mary Cassatt, one of the best at capturing intimate domestic moments, made several studies of bathtime.
Some featured women alone:
But they usually featured mothers and children. This one is modeled on Japanese prints Cassatt had seen:
Here’s an example of the Japanese art that inspired her:
But Cassatt’s masterwork is perhaps the most iconic image of a private bath, painted in 1893:
Bathing is as old as humanity itself. We’ve always wanted to be clean, although we have had many different ways of accomplishing that goal. Whether publicly bathing for hours in an elaborate ritual or taking a quick shower, we’ve seen bathing as an escape from the outside world and a way to maintain our status as civilized people. Though the methods have differed, we’ve long agreed with that Roman mosaic: Bathing is good for you!
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Wonderful article, so much detail and I love all the photographs and art works you have included. Thank you 🙏🏻
Bobby Darin sang about bathing: https://youtu.be/QSA-yHzkvP8?si=ePZPNZeOoiQ9bo5J