Historical sources show that #toiletpapier has been used for a surprisingly long time and that we have often expressed our concerns by hoarding the tool.
The mass production of toilet paper began in the US in 1857, but over the centuries people around the world have used countless other tools.

In a time of panic shopping, it is tempting to think back to a time when toilet paper was widely available and to think about what people actually did before mega-packs of three-layer extra-soft toilet paper were in stores. By the way, there are still hundreds of millions of people around the world, especially in the Middle East and Asia, who do not look at the product at all, because they prefer to close their visit to the toilet with a splash of water. But archaeologists and anthropologists have done quite a bit of dirty work in their research into how people in other cultures and times wiped their buttocks.

Those in the public latrines of ancient Rome used a tersorium, a tool consisting of a stick with a sponge soaked in water with vinegar or salt. The object is regularly mentioned in Roman literature, among other things in a reluctable passage from a letter from the philosopher Seneca to the Roman official Lucilius. In this, Seneca mentions the suicide of a Germanic gladiator, who stuck a stick with a sponge — “dedicated to the lowest uses” — deep down his throat to prevent him from falling prey to the wild animals in the arena.



What did people do before toilet paper existed?