Rubbish in Antiquity

In antiquity man left very little rubbish. Today what we leave is mostly packaging, things that can be used only once, and what we peel from fruit and raw vegetables before cooking. In a city like Rome, capital of the Roman Empire, rubbish was thrown into the street. The rains, and often a monumental fountain, helped the rubbish go straight to the rivers or the sea. The other kind of refuse was used as fertilizer for the fields. Rome is known as a city of 7 hills, but with its broken pieces of pottery it got an eighth hill, called 'Monte Testaccio'. It is said that of the nine sewers of that time, 2 are still in use.

Some say the Romans and the Jews were the peoples who best managed their rubbish. We know that a person's rubbish says a lot about that person. Likewise a nation's rubbish says a lot about that nation. Romans and Jews had similar methods for handling and moving rubbish. The archaeologist Yuval Gadot of Tel Aviv University explains that a hill full of rubbish was found in Jerusalem. For the archaeologist, rubbish is not a waste of time; on the contrary, it teaches him many things about food, dietary customs and trade. This hill was found in what we call today the 'City of David'. The exploration tells us that this was not the work of one person but a public work, of the municipality or the state. The different layers of rubbish and earth explain that they buried the rubbish to avoid the bad smell and preserve public health. The archaeologists suppose that rubbish was collected from the houses and streets and carried to the hill in baskets on donkeys.

Cleanliness in the Roman period was not only for health; it was also a sanctity. With the new Christian religion, cleanliness changed form. The Roman baths, which were like a ritual for the citizens, a ritual of going every day, came to be considered a place of sin. Beside every Roman bath there could also be a gymnasium where the young trained to have a healthy body, as the saying goes, 'a sound mind in a sound body'; these too were considered another place of sin, because the young men trained completely naked. Roman streets generally began with a monumental fountain from which water flowed and cleaned the street. The end of the Roman baths and the monumental fountains was the beginning of pandemics and many diseases. Religion even forbade men to shave, saying it was contrary to belief. Without the drainage system we see today at Ephesus and other Roman cities of antiquity, the streets full of rubbish brought rats and diseases one after another. Instead of keeping wisdom, superstition and ignorance came.

Today we know very well the value of managing rubbish, and we remember the days when Istanbul too suffered from the mistreatment of its rubbish.