Meskó Csaba: Thermal Baths - Our Budapest (Budapest, 1999)
The history of bathing is inseparable from the history of humankind. The deep respect in which we hold life-giving water dates back to prehistoric times. Our forebears venerated springs as sacred shrines. The philosophers of classical antiquity regarded water as one of the four elements. Worshippers of Buddha and Brahma would immerse themselves into the holy water of their rivers to purify their souls and heal their bodies. Water played an equally significant role in the rites of the Egyptian, Jewish, Muslim, and ancient Christian religions. To date, the oldest archaeological finds bearing witness to the existence of a bathing culture in prehistoric times were unearthed in the bed of the Indus River in India. There was once an interconnected network of sewage pipes here, underneath the paved streets of an ancient, at least five thousand year old city whose bathrooms were supplied with water by a communal mains system. The excavations uncovered a thirty by fifty metre bathing hall to which a large sports field had once been connected. The shape of the baths found here reminds one of the baths built three millennia later in Rome and Pompeii. From the evidence of frescos and vase-paintings it can be concluded that the ancient Greeks regarded bathing as a means of strengthening and caring for the human physique as well as washing it. To them, taking a bath purified body and spirit alike. The earliest relics of their culture of bathing date back to the middle of the second millennium B. C. Besides swimming outdoors in the sea and in rivers, the Greeks set great store by indoor bathing, and the cult of the bath tub emerged amongst them, too. In Roman architecture baths always played an important role, providing as they did a public space of social interaction. The Romans liked communal baths with several pools, each holding water of a different temperature. (Incidentally, men and women never bathed together.) Several Roman baths also had gymnasia. Rome, the capital of the empire, was supplied with water by a huge mains system. Public baths were among the largest consumers of running water thus made available. When the unified empire was about to collapse, under the reign of Constantine the Great, Rome had as many as 856 public baths and fifteen hot-water thermae. (Thermae were luxurious bathing complexes of the imperial period with multiple halls, dressing chambers, gymnasia and lounges.) In terms of size and significance, the Bath of Caracalla had a 5
