ShmoopTube

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We all tend to think of hygiene as something that's universal people are [Examples of hygiene]

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either normal decent human beings who shower every day and brush their teeth

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or they're dangerous lunatics who smell funky never do laundry and like to roll [Man jumps into pile of trash]

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around in garbage for fun but it turns out our ideas of what's clean and what's

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dirty and how important those distinctions are are not set in stone so

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let's take a second to get a whiff of ancient hygiene and when we say ancient [Man stood beside smelly painting]

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we're talking about ancient civilizations and cities because it's

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only when humans start to squeeze huge groups of themselves into the same

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square mile that hygiene really becomes an issue urban centers bred new diseases

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like it was their job that's one reason theoretically that the old world

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developed diseases that were a hundred times more vicious than the ones in the [Disease appears in front of boy and his Mum]

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New World Native Americans weren't into city

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life and in some ways well that was a good thing it wasn't easy keeping

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ancient cities clean in fact it was hard keeping them even clean-ish a big thing

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our ancestors needed to even kinda get the job done was access to water [Ancient man beside a river]

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besides needing water to not die of thirst and all access to water allowed

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people to bathe regularly wash their laundry and dishes and keep their homes

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clean access to water wasn't a huge problem for most ancient cities they

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were typically built on rivers and coasts for example Rome is on the Tiber [Rome on a map near the Tiber river]

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River...Lagos is on a giant Harbor and Beijing is on like well five different

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rivers but keeping that water source clean and delivering it to the city's

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inhabitants was a thorny problem the Romans were all like let's throw some

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engineering resources at it...And they developed

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a complicated aqueduct system while aqueducts were impressive stone [A stone made aqueduct]

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constructions that depended on gravity to bring water into the city luckily

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gravity is pretty dependable or they would have had a real problem on their

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hands within their city Romans had actual pipes made of ceramic or lead and

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the lead caused brain damage and birth defects to quote the Roman

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engineers oops.....Another thing ancient cities needed keep from being

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completely disgusting was a system for waste [A green waste bucket appears]

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well they had water check but they also needed to figure out how to keep water

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clean and or remove a ton of human waste from it few people enjoy a glass of raw

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sewage with their scrambled eggs there was the outhouse system but it was [Outhouse system in Rome appears]

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limited it'd only be one story it could only work if there was a low enough

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population density to be able to dig a new hole every couple of years in big

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cities like Rome well this just wasn't an option but the Romans killed it here

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too with the construction of latrines and sewers they didn't have flushing

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toilets or anything but they did have underground pipes and tunnels with water [An underground tunnel with water flowing]

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flowing through them which tended to wash away most of their you know muck so

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was also totally crucial luckily soaps been around for a while

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because it's actually a simple substance mix some animal fat with lye and bam

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sanitation in bar form through chemical magic soap can make lots of molecules [Molecules of soap]

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dissolve in water when they normally wouldn't most cultures devised some

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version of soap in the ancient world and the ones who didn't weren't exactly on the

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ancient tourists top-ten list there

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