A Short History Of The Shower

I love my showers. These days I hand shower because the ceiling above the old claw foot tub upstairs is slanted and a person of any height over 3 feet 5 and a half inches cannot stand in the tub unless one is bent over. And everyone knows you can't bend over to take a shower. All the water just bounces off your back and doesn't get to the good parts. So I sit and shower. It's really quite comfortable. I call it a "sitting while showering" (or "sitowering").

Ancient cavemen, from the time they grew limbs and crawled out of the sea, never really worried about cleanliness. In fact, getting wet was very irritating to them as they had just dried out after having been fish for centuries and so they used to hide in caves when it rained.

In the Bronze Age the Upper Mesopotamians, who were more interested in keeping clean, took a clue from the common sparrow, who would give themselves a shower by jumping in puddles, splashing water up and onto their bodies with their wings. They discovered that by dumping a gourd of water over their heads from the Euphrates River, they would clean the dirt from themselves after a day in the fields: which both invigorated them and made them more conducive to the attentions of members of the opposite sex. When the Greeks came to visit, they made the shower into a ritual, first with servants and water jugs, then devising lead pipes to bring water from the mountains into their homes. Baths became known as a poor man's shower.

The Romans, never ones to be one-upped, adopted the shower for their own and invented the communal shower room that still exist in gyms, prisons and military barracks to this very day. After the fall of the Roman Empire and the rise of Christianity, cleansing yourself became a religious taboo and was abandoned almost completely from the late Middle Ages until the Victorian era. By the time the taboo was lifted, a grateful public eagerly brought showers into their homes. Today, having a shower in one's home is almost a given. The end.