It’s commonly said that writers have the weirdest search histories. I can attest that my own search history includes such queries as “how long does it take a human body to decay in the open?” and “how long does it take to suffocate someone?” I swear, it was all for research.
At other times, writing a simple scene of a character walking down a London street at night in 1914 led me to spend a good hour researching the history of London street lighting (truly, as Theodore Dalrymple says, there is no subject so boring that someone hasn’t written a book on it – or put up a web page). Hence the other common saying among writers: “Writing is 1% inspiration, 99% not being distracted by the internet”.
But one of the more unusual – and least incriminating – searches I have made came about when I was endeavouring to inject some verisimilitude into a fantasy story I was writing. My characters were on a quest-in-the-wild type adventure, which led me to wonder: how exactly did people wipe their bums before toilet paper?
As it turns out, historians have wondered much the same.
Toilet paper has quite a history, it must be said. The first recorded use of paper for bum-wiping purposes comes from 6th-century China. In 598, scholar Yen Chih-Thui, “Paper on which there are quotations or commentaries from the Five Classics or the names of sages, I dare not use for toilet purposes”. So, much as my mum tells us they did during the Depression, the Chinese were keeping the Middle Kingdom’s equivalent of old newspapers around for recycling.
Dedicated loo-paper was being manufactured by the millions in China by the 14th century. In Europe, paper was becoming more readily available, but commercial toilet paper was invented in the mid-19th century. The familiar bog-roll was invented at the end of the 19th century. By the 1930s, toilet paper was even, according to manufacturer’s boast, “splinter free”!
But, how did our ancestors clean the clackers, as the schoolboy doggerel goes, “in days of old when knights were bold and paper wasn’t invented”?
Before they were avoiding befouling the Classics, one of the oldest known materials for bum-wiping is the Chinese “hygiene stick”, which dates back some 2,000 years. The hygiene stick was a wooden or bamboo stick wrapped in cloth.
Sticks – called a tersorium – were also the preferred cleaning utensil of the Greeks and Romans. Instead of cloth, the Greco-Romans fixed a sea sponge at one end. Just as Roman toilets were communal, so was the tersorium. Although thank the Gods, the tersorium was at least cleaned in a handy bucket of vinegar or salt water.
Ancient Roman toilets were communal – as were their bum-wiping sticks. The BFD.
If they weren’t able to employ a sponge on a stick, Greeks and Romans also resorted to fragments of ceramic. Some were (thankfully) oval or circular pieces of pottery called pessoi, but many were literal pot-shards. Ouch. Especially vindictive Greeks could scrape their clinkers with an ostraka. These were ceramic pieces inscribed with the names of wrongdoers who were facing a vote on their ostracism. Once the vote had been cast, insult was added to injury by re-using the ostraka for bum-wiping.
The Japanese also used sticks called chuugi, but unlike the Chinese or Romans, they were used to clean both outside and inside the anus. Yes, the ancient Japanese literally had a stick up their arse.
But not everyone in history had access to fancy sticks or pottery fragments. Most peasant-y types made do with just about anything they could lay their hands on: leaves, grass, stones, scraps of fur, or seashells. Mediaeval commoners frequently used moss, hay or straw.
When the pilgrims in the New World were introduced to maize by the Native Americans, it didn’t just keep them alive through the harsh winters, it kept their nether regions clean. Corn cobs were a commonly-used butt-scraping material. Funny, they don’t mention that in the Thanksgiving stories.
Another common method through history is still widespread in parts of the world today: water. During the Great TP Panic of early 2020, an Indian-Australian comedian joked that Australians ought to resort to the traditional Indian method of “us[ing] water to clean your behinds instead of using a tissue wipe”.
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