ABSTRACT
Mesopotamia is the locus of the world's earliest cities, and the early inhabitants of Mesopotamia were the first to face many problems of urban sustainability and challenges to individual and community health. There were no civic projects that made daily life easier for Mesopotamia's urban inhabitants: paving of streets, supplying of clean water or provision of sewers or public latrines were never recorded as notable events of kings' reigns, nor are such projects present in the archaeological record. The overall picture of sanitation in urban southern Mesopotamia is of a geographically widespread engagement with the problem of human waste and very similar solutions to the problem in the use of two types of drains below squat toilet installations. The longest horizontal drain known from southern Mesopotamia may be that in the Moon God complex at Ur in the Neo-Babylonian 1st millennium BC, probably dedicated to rainwater removal.
