A Toilet at Qumran

In an excavation area of Qumran called “Locus 51, ” Roland de Vaux, the Dominican Catholic priest who led the excavations at Qumran between 1951 and 1956, identified a feature that he interpreted as a toilet. It was located in the eastern part of one of the main buildings. While scholars today generally agree that the feature is indeed a toilet, there are differences of opinion as to how its presence should be interpreted.

The installation identified by de Vaux (and published in English by Jean-Baptiste Humbert and Alain Chambon of the École Biblique) consists of a terracotta pipe set into a bottomless receptacle made of unbaked clay that was surrounded with coarse dirt.¹ This construction is consistent with similar toilet installations that existed elsewhere in the ancient Mediterranean.² In the absence of public “luxury” latrines, which were used primarily by the ancient Romans and were constantly flushed with a stream of water running through canals built especially for this purpose, many private and public buildings had toilet installations such as this one. A seat made of wood or stone was built over a cesspit that contained the waste. In some cases, the cesspit was not dug directly underneath the toilet but rather connected to it by a pipe, through which water could be poured in order to flush away the sewage. These types of toilets were already present in the Levant and Egypt during the Late Bronze Age.