INTRODUCTION Today, as we walk through the stone-paved streets of Pompeii or the ancient baths of Rome, the past appears much cleaner than it actually was. The marbles have been washed, the sewers have been emptied, and the animals, markets, workshops, and crowds in the streets have disappeared. Only the stones remain. However, to truly understand an ancient city, one must imagine not only how it looked but also how it smelled . In a Roman street, it was possible to encounter animal dung, urine, food scraps, organic waste from workshops, and dirty water. In some houses in Pompeii, toilets were located right next to the kitchen; instead of being connected to the sewer, they opened into septic tanks beneath the house. Urine was used in textile workshops, animal hides and remains were processed in tanneries, and businesses producing fish sauce spread the smell of fermented fish into the environment. Nevertheless, the same society had built aqueducts, baths, fountains, and massive drainage networks. This contradiction was not unique to Rome. With the beginning of people living in large communities, one of the most fundamental problems of civilization emerged: What would be done with the garbage and waste produced by thousands of people? Therefore, the history of waste is, in fact, the history of the city itself. The Birth of Cities, the Accumulation of Filth Mesopotamia, where the world's first major cities emerged, was also one of the regions where humanity first faced serious urban sanitation problems. By the mid-4th millennium BC, some settlements had spread over dozens of hectares and their populations began to be expressed in thousands. More people meant more food, more production; it also meant more animal dung, broken items, food scraps, and human waste. In Augusta McMahon's study, overcrowding, difficulties in accessing clean water, and the continuously accumulating waste were emphasized as fundamental problems of urban life in early Mesopotamian cities. It cannot be said that Mesopotamia was underdeveloped in terms of engineering. Temples, walls, canals, and irrigation systems were being built. However, in the inscriptions of kings and archaeological records, clean water systems covering the entire city, public toilets, or central sewage projects are not equally visible. The acquisition of drinking water and the removal of human waste seem to have largely been left to the households' own means. Nevertheless, the Mesopotamians were not unaware of toilets. Some houses used deep pits dug into the ground, while in others, waste was transferred to other points via sloped channels. In the palaces of Tell Asmar from the 3rd millennium BC, there were seating areas made of baked bricks, while in an example from Nuzi, even a marble backrest was found. Some of the toilets found in Alalakh in southeastern Anatolia were connected to drains or septic tanks extending from the walls to the street. The issue was not the existence of these technologies but their prevalence. It appears that there were no permanent toilets for every house in the excavated neighborhoods of Mesopotamia. Therefore, it is possible that many households used portable containers or systems resembling buckets. The filled containers were taken outside the city, dumped at specific points, or utilized in agriculture. Since there is no strong evidence of a professionally organized regular waste collection system by the state, much of the responsibility fell on the households themselves. Waste was not always worthless. Human and animal dung was fertilizer for agriculture. Archaeological traces around settlements in northern Mesopotamia suggest that household waste may have been used to enhance soil fertility by being transported to fields. Thus, materials that we only see as "filth" today could have had economic value in ancient societies. However, these systems could easily turn into a health problem. The drainage channels in some Mesopotamian houses were directly discharging into the street. Rain and washing water diluted the waste but also spread it over a wider area. The stagnant dirty water left in the streets created a surface that people came into contact with and also provided a suitable environment for disease-carrying organisms. With the growth of cities, garbage piles also grew. Large dumps were found in centers like Ur, Abu Salabikh, and Tell Majnuna, where materials from houses, craft workshops, and institutional structures were collected. The layers at Tell Majnuna suggest that some of the waste was not randomly accumulated but rather piled up through large-scale collection activities at specific times. In other words, the first city dwellers had developed various regulations to combat waste from very early on. This experience gradually transformed into more complex systems. In the Minoan civilization of Crete, it is seen that rainwater was collected from roofs and used to move waste from baths and toilets at the Palace of Knossos. The total length of the drainage network in Knossos exceeded 150 meters. There were also quite advanced water and canal systems in centers like Phaistos and Zakros; some channels in Zakros were large enough for a person to pass through. Around the 4th century BC, with the increasing visibility of private and public toilets in the Greek world, large latrines with long rows of seating emerged. The Romans later carried this tradition across the vast geography of the empire. Thus, Rome's famous sanitation system was not an instantaneous miracle but a broader continuation of water and waste technologies that had developed over centuries in Mesopotamia and the Aegean world. The Great Contradiction of Rome: Huge Sewers, Dirty Streets The Romans showcased some of the greatest achievements of the ancient world in water engineering. Aqueducts brought fresh water to the city from kilometers away; fountains, baths, and public buildings were fed by this network. Rome's famous Cloaca Maxima system had become a large underground network connecting various drainage lines of the city to the Tiber River during the late Republic period. Rainwater from the streets, water overflowing from fountains, and the accompanying debris could be transported through these lines. However, it is misleading to think of the Cloaca Maxima as a modern sewage system. Ann Olga Koloski-Ostrow's study on the scents of Rome emphasizes that one of the system's primary functions was not to remove human waste but to drain the water that accumulated in the low-lying areas of the city. Rome frequently faced floods from the Tiber, and drainage was therefore vital. Of course, feces, animal manure, and trash also mixed into the channels; however, the presence of sewage beneath Rome did not mean that every house was connected to this system like in a modern city. Pompeii is one of the best examples of this. While some areas of the city had drainage and sewage, in other streets, rain became the primary means of removing dirty water. In the winter months, rain could wash away the filth that accumulated in the streets; however, during the hot and dry summer months, the same filth remained in place. Koloski-Ostrow notes that the streets of Pompeii could be heavily odorous in the summer and that the famous raised stepping stones were important for crossing the dirty roads. Ancient written sources also indicate that the streets of Rome were not sterile. Juvenal's satires depict narrow streets filled with crowded people, animals, mud, slaves carrying food, and carts. When evaluated alongside archaeological data, it becomes clear that animal manure, dirty water, urine, food scraps, and various trash were part of daily life in the city. Moreover, human waste was not only on the streets. Many private houses in Pompeii and Herculaneum had single-person toilets, but most of these were not directly connected to the main sewage system. Waste accumulated in the cesspools beneath the houses and was later emptied by hand. The extracted feces could be sold as fertilizer for agricultural land or used in home gardens. What is more surprising from a modern human perspective is that most of these toilets were located inside or very close to the kitchen . In such a house, there could be an open or semi-open cesspool just a few meters away while food was being prepared. This may be partly due to the desire to collect the activities considered dirty in the same service area. The world of smells in Rome was not just about feces. Fullonica workshops, which worked in the fabric cleaning and processing business, utilized urine. Since the ammonia content of urine was useful in textile processing, it was a substance of economic value in the city. The story of Emperor Vespasian taxing urine collection activities in Roman culture even shows how well-known this relationship was. Leatherworking was another major source of odor. When animal hides were processed, the carcasses and internal organs had to be disposed of. The provisions in Ulpianus's Digest prohibiting the throwing of animal parts into the streets indicate that this behavior was a real urban problem. Not all workshops had been moved to industrial areas far from the city; disturbing production activities could be found side by side with residences. Markets, bakeries, wine production, olive presses, and fermented fish sauce garum also completed the city's mix of smells. Therefore, it is also inadequate to imagine Rome merely as "a city that smells of dung." The scent of fresh bread, wine, fruits, incense, and perfume could encounter the odors of animals, sewage, and workshops on the same street. Even baths are part of this contradiction. Today, Roman baths evoke cleanliness for us; indeed, bathing was extremely important in Roman life. However, a hot pool in a bath could be shared by many people throughout the day. Koloski-Ostrow reminds us that people with open wounds, various skin diseases, and parasites could have also been in the same environment. Especially later in the day, the water could not be expected to be clean by modern standards. Piers Mitchell's paleoparasitological research reveals more concrete evidence from archaeology at this point. Despite the existence of public toilets, aqueducts, fountains, sanitation laws, and a culture of regular bathing in the Roman world, whipworm, roundworm, and Entamoeba histolytica causing dysentery maintained their prevalence. There is also archaeological evidence regarding external parasites such as lice, fleas, and bedbugs. The problem here was not that the Romans did not understand cleanliness. It was the lack of knowledge about the life cycles of microorganisms and parasites. The use of human feces collected from the city as fertilizer in fields could lead to the transfer of parasite eggs to the crops if left untreated for a sufficiently long time. Mitchell notes that this is one possible explanation for the continued prevalence of roundworm and whipworm during the Roman period. So, Rome could be a society that was both extremely concerned with cleanliness and not hygienic in the modern sense at the same time. Having an aqueduct did not mean having a germ theory. The Middle Ages: The Myth of "Everyone Throwing Their Trash Out the Window" There is a widespread image that after Rome, Europe completely abandoned sanitation. Medieval cities are often depicted as places filled with mud, feces, and garbage; where people did not wash and municipalities did nothing. The reality is more complex. Of course, medieval cities were dirty by modern standards. Access to running water was limited; as the population increased, narrow streets and inadequate waste systems posed problems. However, Ebru Emine Oğuz's Cleanliness and Hygiene in Medieval Europe emphasizes that low-tech waste systems should not be confused with the absence of any system . In late medieval cities, there were cesspools, open drains, some sewer networks, and practices related to the transport