Throughout all of human history, people have had need to eat. And, throughout all of human history, people have had need to get rid of their digested food. This can become quite an issue, as, if dealt with improperly, human waste spreads diseases like cholera and hepatitis. Luckily, outbreaks like these have not been common since the mid-late 19th century, when sewers became more common in large European cities. However, sewers, and toilets, for that matter, have existed long before the 1800s. The sewage systems in the Indus Valley, Rome, Paris, and London, are perhaps four of the most renowned sewage systems in history and their creations span thousands of years. In this essay, I will explore how these civilizations and their sewer systems were correlated to classism (Mainly the poor and the rich)?
The first “proper sewage system”, according to the BBC, was created approximately 4,500 years ago in the Indus Valley (what is now modern-day India and Pakistan). Their waste management system was sophisticated for its time and even included indoor toilets. In fact, “Recent excavations in Harappa have uncovered toilets in almost every house, (Upinder, 148).” These toilets ranged in complexity from a hole in the ground to a pot to even full-blown lavatory seats made of brick and wood. Regardless, the toilets had holes that would carry the waste underneath the house through earthenware pipes. In small towns, the waste would drain into jars or fields outside of the home to be dealt with at a later time. In more elaborate cities, the pipes would drain into street drains made of brick nearly two yards below the city. These open drains were two yards deep and would drain into cesspits that were underneath by manhole covers. According to Singh Upinder, these cesspits would need to be cleaned out regularly to keep the city sanitary. Excess waste was dumped out in the fields outside of the city. The society in this civilization was divided into four classes. These were Brahmins (These were the priests and intellectuals), Kshatriyas (These were the warriors and kings), Vaishya (These were the merchants and landowners) and Shudra (These were the peasants and commoners). And all the menial task that are were described by Singh, such as cleaning and emptying cesspits were performed by the Shudras.
About 2,000 years later, the Romans developed a sewage system of their own: The Cloaca Maxima (greatest sewer). The Cloaca Maxima was not originally meant to be a sewer. In fact, hundreds of years before it was used for waste disposal, it was commissioned by the last three kings of Rome in the 6th century BC. “The Cloaca began as a monumental, open-air, fresh-water canal. This canal guided streams through the newly leveled, paved, open space that would become the Forum Romanum, (Hopkins, 1).” The last king of Rome, Tarquin the Proud, had walls built around it. It wasn’t until the Domitian Era (circa. 81-96AD) that it was used for human excrement. “As the city and its population grew, the need for a large drainage system and sanitation network became important for hygiene and to keep streets and buildings as free from floodwaters as possible, (Carpano).” The Romans’ toilets were public latrines that drained into the Cloaca Maxima, which let out in the river Tiber.
Paris’ first sewers were commissioned by King Phillipe Auguste about a thousand years later, in the 1200s. In their early phases, the Parisian sewers were quite primitive. Raw sewage thrown from citizens’ chamber pots drained down the middle of a paved road into open gutters, which in turn drained into the River Seine. The poor would have to tread through the muck while the rich rode in carriages whose wheels rolled on either side of the trough. This was the origin of the saying, “taking the high road”, the high road being the clean part of the street raised above the drainage channel. “The first underground sewer was built in 1370 beneath the Rue Montmartre, and drained into a tributary of the Seine River, (mtholyoke.edu).” At this point in time, waste was discharged into the Seine, leading to poor health conditions and a lack of clean water supply. Over the centuries, the sewers were added onto and expanded. In 1805, Napolean hired a man named Brunseau to build 182 miles of new underground sewer tunnels. It wasn’t until 1869, when Eugène Belgrand and Baron Haussmann completed the development of the modern sewer system of Paris by considerably increasing the size of the system and introducing aqueducts as a means of running water.
In 1832, the sewers of Paris were far from being what they are today. Brunseau had made a beginning, but it took the cholera epidemic to bring about the vast reconstruction that has since taken place… The three cesspools of Le Combat, Le Cunette, and Saint-Mandé, with their discharging branches, their apparatus, their pits, and their purifying branches, only date from 1836. The intestinal canal of Paris has been rebuilt anew, and, as we have said, increased more than ten-fold within a quarter of a century, (Hugo 1269).
With the Industrial Revolution came a lot of migration toward major cities, particularly in Britain. An obvious choice for hopeful migrants was London. With the upsurge in the population, waste management became a bigger problem. The nineteenth century was a rather unsanitary period in London’s history; the poor threw their waste out into the streets and the rich had water closets, rooms with flushing toilets which drained pure sewage into the River Thames, the town’s source of drinking water. Sewers existed in London since the Elizabethan Era, but they were open to the street and only served in transporting raw sewage from the streets to the river. The whole town reeked so badly of poo that, in 1858, the smell came to be known as the ‘Great Stink’. Simultaneously, cholera ripped through London. It was widely believed that cholera was passed through the air in what was called a miasma, a stink that poisons the air and carries disease (think “germs”). In reality, the cholera was a result of the infected water supply. The issue escalated to the point that the parliament decided to commission sewers. The parliament paid three million pounds ($4.3 million) to engineer Joseph Bazalgette to solve the problem. His solution involved placing five major brick-lined sewers collectively measuring 82 miles long below London on either side of the River Thames as well as over 1,000 miles of street sewers to collect sewage as it flowed down the streets. The new tunnels redirected the raw sewage downstream, “where [it was] dumped, untreated, into the Thames, (Wikipedia).” It wasn’t until the 1900s that the sewage was treated.
The invention of sanitation sewers considerably stemmed the tide of disease. Although they were invented in completely different eras of history, these sewers all followed a similar pattern: they began with open-street sewers, which drained, collected and deposited human waste. From the Indus Valley cesspools to modern labyrinthine networks of sewage tunnels and percolation ponds, 7,000 years of innovation has led to the healthiest time in recorded history.