What Did People Use Before Toilet Paper?

Watch this story

The full episode is on YouTube, about ten minutes long.

Updated: November 14, 2026

In a Roman public latrine, twenty people sat side by side with no stalls, and the toilet paper was a sponge on a stick, shared by everyone and rinsed in a channel of running water. It sounds like a joke, and it was everyday life. Before toilet paper, every culture on earth had to answer the same question, and the answers were wildly different. Stones. Sticks. Sponges. Corn cobs. Catalogs. Toilet paper as we know it is barely a hundred and fifty years old.

The sponge on a stick

Start in Rome, because Rome had the most famous answer, and the most argued-over one. A Roman public latrine was called a forica: a room full of stone benches arranged in a U-shape, with keyhole-shaped holes, and no stalls, no dividers, no privacy at all. Dozens of people sat shoulder to shoulder, and it was a social place. People did business there, exchanged gossip, and caught up on the news. The cleaning tool was the tersorium, also known by its Greek name, the xylospongium, which means wood-sponge. It was exactly what it sounds like: a natural sea sponge fixed to the end of a long wooden stick. After use, the sponge was rinsed in the channel of fresh running water that flowed along the floor in front of the benches, or dunked in a bucket of salt water or vinegar, and left ready for the next person.

And the next person was the problem. In a public latrine, the sponge was shared. One tersorium could pass through dozens of hands in a single morning, rinsed in water that was never hot and never clean for long. A bucket of salt water or vinegar sounds like disinfection, but it did almost nothing to a porous sponge full of trapped waste. It was a breeding ground for bacteria, and disease spread through the latrine with it. The wealthy, sensibly, carried their own sponge.

Here is where historians start to argue. Some scholars say the sponge on a stick was never for wiping at all. The Austrian archaeologist Gilbert Wiplinger has pointed out that no ancient text clearly describes the tersorium being used on a person. His argument is that it was a toilet brush, for cleaning the latrine itself. The written evidence for wiping with a sponge is thin: the practice is attested only once in the surviving texts. The shared sponge makes the best story, and it may be true, but the honest answer is that we are not entirely sure.

Stones, sticks and cloth

If Rome had the sponge, Greece had the stone. The ancient Greeks wiped with smooth stones and fragments of ceramic, known as pessoi, the Greek word for pebbles. The pessoi had one feature no other wiping tool in history can claim. Some of them were inscribed with names. Archaeologists have found pessoi carrying the names of people the owner disliked, and the joke writes itself: if you had an enemy, you could quite literally wipe yourself with his name. It is the pettiest insult in the ancient world, and it was carved in stone.

Far to the east, on the Silk Road, archaeologists found a different answer. In 1992, in a latrine at Xuanquanzhi, a Han dynasty military station on the edge of the Taklamakan desert, they dug up seven sticks of bamboo and wood, about two thousand years old. Each one was wrapped in cloth at the end, like a small spatula, and tests found faecal matter on them. They had names in old texts, salaka and cechou, and they are the oldest known wiping tools ever found. As always, money changed the answer. The rich used soft things: fine cloth, wool, even lace. Everyone else used what was free and close at hand.

Paper, corn cobs and catalogs

Paper was invented in China in the second century before Christ, but it took centuries before anyone thought to use it in the toilet. The first recorded use of paper for cleansing comes from the sixth century, in the writings of the scholar Yan Zhitui.

Across the ocean, in colonial America, the answer was growing in the fields. The dried corn cob, after the corn had been eaten, was rough, absorbent, and free, and Americans used it through the 1700s and long after. On the frontier, the corn cob was the standard. Then came the printed page. As newspapers and catalogs spread in the 1700s and 1800s, Americans started hanging them in the outhouse. The Farmers' Almanac and the Sears, Roebuck catalog were favorites, and the Almanac even came with a hole punched in the corner so it could hang on a nail. The story goes that when Sears switched to glossy, clay-coated paper in the 1930s, the catalog stopped working for the job. The replacement arrived in 1857, when Joseph Gayetty began selling the first commercially made toilet paper in New York.

So the next time you reach for the roll without thinking, remember what it replaced: a shared sponge in Rome, a stone with your enemy's name in Greece, a bamboo stick on the Silk Road, a corn cob in America, and a mail-order catalog in the outhouse. The roll is new. The problem is ancient.