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Chapter 1 CLEANLINESS : PRECEDING THE BATHROOM An interest in cleanliness preceded the modern bathroom by millennia, not just centuries. A brief look around the world, especially in the West- ern tradition, will show the varying attitudes toward the functions that eventually became located in the bathroom. The trajectory of ever-greater interest in personal cleanliness in the West is not a straight one the ancient Romans’ obsession with bathing was not equaled until the 20th century. Different motivations for cleanliness help explain this uneven path, as one rationale gained ascendancy at one time, while another ruled at another time. The impulse toward cleanliness could be driven by medical con- siderations, including personal hygiene pleasure, such as relaxation or regeneration religious inspiration, aligning a clean body with a clean soul, for instance and social customs, such as gatherings in bathhouses. All these motivations play into the interest in bathrooms in the United States today, but in the past, they dictated very different behaviors. Furthermore, cleanliness was not always achieved with water or even steam. Expanding the understanding of cleanliness helps to question the inevitability of the bathroom as it exists today. Evidence of water control for personal use in early cultures survives, but it is difficult to determine the underlying attitudes toward cleanliness that this might have implied. Chinese settlements had some sort of plumbing involving pipes made from bamboo in the fifth millennium BCE (Carter 2006, 24). In the third millennium BCE, the houses in Mohenjo-daro in the Indus Valley in present-day Pakistan included a bathing room with a bathtub that drained into a cesspit and then into a sewer main, which emptied into a river outside the city walls (Carter 2006, 25). The Minoan civilization on the island of Crete, dating from around 2000 BC, had not