BARlines

You Can Never Find One When You Need One

Last year we reported on two stone toilet seats that had been excavated in the City of David, just to the south of the Temple Mount in Jerusalem.^a The article also referred to two toilet seats that had been discovered earlier in Jerusalem and to two others said to have been found in Jordan. Rupert Chapman, in the January–June 1992 issue of Palestine Exploration Quarterly, writes that the reference to one of the supposed finds in Jordan, at Tell es-Saideyh, appears to be a misunderstanding; no toilet seat was found there. But even as Chapman was removing, so to speak, one toilet seat, he was bringing another one to light.

While organizing the records of the Palestine Exploration Fund, of which he is executive secretary, Chapman came across a photograph and a description of a toilet seat like the ones BAR reported, found in Jerusalem in 1925 by the Rev. J. Garrow Duncan, who was digging on behalf of the Fund. The toilet seat was located in the City of David near the well-known stepped stone structure, though the precise location of the find remains vague, Chapman writes. References to the seat were deleted from Duncan’s excavation report, evidently a victim of 1920s British sensitivities on matters of personal hygiene.