The toilet seat from the estate at Armon ha-Natziv. The site, excavated in 2019, probably dates from the days of King Manasseh, a client king for the Assyrians who ruled for fifty years in the mid-7th century. Credit: Ya’akov Billig
Study of 2,500-year-old latrines from the biblical Kingdom of Judah shows the ancient faeces within contain Giardia - a parasite that can cause dysentery. The toilet seat from the estate at Armon ha-Natziv. The site, excavated in 2019, probably dates from the days of King Manasseh, a client king for the Assyrians who ruled for fifty years in the mid-7th century. Credit: Ya'akov Billig Toilets with cesspits from this time are relatively rare and were usually made only for the elite Piers Mitchell A new analysis of ancient faeces taken from two Jerusalem latrines dating back to the biblical Kingdom of Judah has uncovered traces of a single-celled microorganism Giardia duodenalis - a common cause of debilitating diarrhoea in humans. A research team led by the University of Cambridge say it is the oldest example we have of this diarrhoea-causing parasite infecting humans anywhere on the planet. The study is published in the journal Parasitology . -The fact that these parasites were present in sediment from two Iron Age Jerusalem cesspits suggests that dysentery was endemic in the Kingdom of Judah,- said study lead author Dr Piers Mitchell from Cambridge's Department of Archaeology.
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