Plague of Strength

Think we’re the height of civilization?

We only just rediscovered the flush toilet and internal plumbing, and that shit been around for over 4000 years. The city state of Mohenjo-Daro (2600 – 1900 BCE) in modern Pakistan lasted without evidence of war for almost a thousand years, and it is currently the oldest civilization of which we know with a planned sewage system and indoor plumbing.

Toilets in the city were built in the form of brick boxes, like the recreation in the photo, and were flushed by dumping a clay jar of water into them. They sat over clay pipes leading to outflow drainage trenches lined with brick treated with lime (to help disinfect them) “that would feed into an adjacent soak pit (cesspit). The soak pits would be periodically emptied of their solid matter, possibly to be used as fertilizer. Most houses also had private wells. City walls functioned as a barrier against floods.”

Almost every house in Mohenjo-Daro was equipped with a private bathing and toilet with drainage and water-tight floors to keep moisture from seeping into the other rooms nearby or below (they basically lived in planned brick apartments).

In case you’re curious, the first known flush toilet in the West was in the Royal Palace at Knossos on Crete and dates to 1700 BCE. It had a latrine on the ground floor and was flushed using water held in a rooftop water reservoir that collected rainwater for that purpose.

They had plumbing, dentistry, plastic surgery, and weight lifting, but no electricity and no internal combustion engine- for all intents and purposes, they were as socially evolved as we are.

Makes you think what the rest of their society was like, right? What their politics and economics were, or what their idea of a “golden age” civilization was, would be cool shit to know, as would their music and other entertainment. It’s likely we’ll never know that stuff, unless we just uncover some kind of ancient hidden library of the world, but it definitely makes you think we’re looking at the wrong people if we’re looking at the Greeks for inspiration, because they stole everything they knew from the Mesopotamians… like geometry.

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