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Faecal matters: an excremental archive of early Port Said

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  25 September 2025

Lucia Carminati Open the ORCID record for Lucia Carminati [Opens in a new window]
Lucia Carminati*
Affiliation:
Department of Archaeology, Conservation and History, https://ror.org/01xtthb56 University of Oslo , Oslo, Norway
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Email: lucia.carminati@iakh.uio.no
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Abstract

Excrements are slippery objects of historical inquiry. They are seldom nominated, often tiptoed around. Excreta are only apparently trifling matters, yet they bear the traces of events that could not be otherwise observed. They demand consideration of the mundane and seemingly apolitical dimension of everyday life. They show up in archival trickles that, if followed up seriously, point to what political and economic histories may have swiped out of plain view. Excrements in 1859–69 Port Said convey that the Suez Canal Company may not have been at all that concerned or effective in its management of public hygiene in the encampments and towns sprouting along the canal. The Egyptian government was similarly unimpactful, but tried to tackle some of the issues confronting booming towns in Egypt and elsewhere: planning flaws, ‘miasmatic effluvia’, desertic and acquatic dumpsters and a seemingly ever-growing volume of and proximity to trash.

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Urban History , First View , pp. 1 - 17
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To seafarers in the 1860s, the few constructions erected on the sandy dunes that made up the budding town of Būr Sa’īd (Port Said) would have been barely visible. As seen from the sea, wrote a ship’s surgeon in 1891, the town lay ‘low on the desert and the sea surrounded it almost completely’.Footnote 1 When ship passengers caught sight of the two long piers protruding into the sea and signalling the entry of the Suez Canal in the making, they may have wondered where on earth these piers would lead. Only the masts of anchored boats and the smoke plumes rising above the town gave away the fact that there lay a newly minted urban centre.Footnote 2 As they approached the shore, their noses may have been their reluctant guides: the town’s gut-wrenching wafts rapidly shattered whatever favourable impression the conglomeration may have rendered from the sea.Footnote 3 On the one hand, steamships, since they started regularly plying the Mediterranean waters in the mid-1830s, had made travel relatively more sterile, comfortable and safer than before.Footnote 4 Yet, overwhelming sensory inputs troubled the aloofness of the railings high above the waves. Nauseated travellers explicitly recalled that, while they were still on board, their peculiar olfactory experience of the town’s harbour diverted their attention away from the grandiose spectacle of the sea.Footnote 5 In fact, waste waters imbibed the soil of Port Said and its cesspits let out exhalations that could hardly go unnoticed. If, once they stepped down off their vessel, visitors came near the stained wood hut that housed the town’s slaughterhouse near the town’s northern shore, they would be struck by the nauseating stench it exuded.Footnote 6 In 1867, one of the leading medical authorities on site claimed that Port Said could have been ‘one of the most salubrious cities in the Mediterranean’. For the time being, however, that potential went unfulfilled. The town admittedly lacked a good sewage and cesspool system.Footnote 7

Founded only a handful of years before, on 25 April 1859, on a narrow strip of land in Egyptian–Ottoman territory between the Manzala lake and the Mediterranean Sea, Port Said was the first and northernmost worksite run by the Compagnie universelle du canal maritime de Suez (hereafter the ‘Company’). The Company had been formed in 1858 by Frenchman Ferdinand de Lesseps in agreement with the Egyptian ruler Saʿīd in order to excavate a waterway across the Suez Isthmus and connect the Mediterranean and the Red Sea.Footnote 8 Forcibly and voluntarily, tens of thousands of Egyptian and non-Egyptian workers migrated to the Isthmus to toil on the worksites that the Company was setting up with the Egyptian government’s backing. People came from the rest of Egypt, both from areas in the northern Nile Delta and the southern Egyptian provinces. They also hailed from areas further south as well as countries north of the Mediterranean rim, which they left behind to try their luck given the relatively cheap trans-Mediterranean steamship travel and Egypt’s rapid economic development.Footnote 9 Port Said was thus made from scratch at mid-century by newcomers. Born as a ‘tabula rasa with no one then “native” to it’, matured into an ebullient stopover for bored and thirsty visitors and aged into a relatively small town of passage: Port Said promised more than what it delivered.Footnote 10

Through the lens of a history of Port Said that is simultaneously social, cultural and environmental, this article retraces how people ‘struggled to understand, control, and manage nature’ (and each other) and accounts for the ways in which the environment moulded behaviours and ideas.Footnote 11 This article captures Port Said in its first decade, before the canal was officially inaugurated in November 1869, as it juggled waste and specifically excreta. It lingers on the latter especially because of their pervasive and yet elusive qualities. And it seizes Port Said in a time of transition, when, as Alain Corbin provocatively suggests, people may have still clung on to the excrements, dung and rubbish they had long lived next to and resisted authorities in the latter’s nascent battle against filth.Footnote 12 What complicated matters on the Isthmus of Suez was the overlapping and potentially conflicting presence of different but equally concerned authorities. As early as 1819, Egypt’s ruler Muḥammad ʻAlī had endeavoured to take measures about the population’s health even if his strongest concern lay with the health and hygiene of his soldiers.Footnote 13 In 1825, he established the Health Council in Cairo, initially devoted to the army but later also serving the Egyptian population at large.Footnote 14 In the 1830s, as Khaled Fahmy has shown, debates and actions around the creation of a public health system on Egypt’s national level continued.Footnote 15 Ever since the foundation of Port Said in April 1859, the Company may have entrusted French medical doctor Louis Rémy Aubert-Roche to oversee health-related matters, with a Company-run ‘health service’ being officially in place starting January 1860.Footnote 16 In 1864, the Company organized an entity known as ‘bureaux detachés’ and tasked it with all municipal affairs, including public health.Footnote 17 But in the meantime, the canal area had become a governorate via a decree issued in March 1863 by the Egyptian ruler Ismaʻīl, who had succeeded his predecessor Saʿīd only two months prior.Footnote 18 Government authorities tasked with the management of health arrived shortly thereafter. On 2 May 1866, the president of Egypt’s ‘Intendance sanitaire’ headquartered in Alexandria announced to the agent supérieur of the Company that the Intendance would establish health services in Port Said, Qanṭara/Kantara and Ismailia. The Company would have to transfer its two hospitals, one in Port Said and the other in Ismailia, to the Egyptian government.Footnote 19

When it came to handling the land itself, it was the Company that, until 1866, handed out concessions to each individual or firm that wished to settle in the Isthmus. Construction there was generally temporary, made of wood and not intended to last longer than the lifespan of the worksite.Footnote 20 The portion of land rented to ‘Arabs’ was very small, whereas that rented to Europeans was larger (thanks in part to the support from their consular representatives in town).Footnote 21 In 1864, Ismaʻīl and De Lesseps, who disagreed over the extent and form of control over the land that had been previously conceded for the canal’s undertaking, submitted their differences to the arbitration of the French emperor. In the wake of such arbitration, arguably putting Egypt at a disadvantage, and in light of the strained relationship with the Ottoman sovereign, the Egyptian government claimed a more prominent role in the administration of the Isthmus. Alongside the ever-present Company, it jointly participated in the domaine commun, an entity created to administer the land along the canal and share the revenue deriving from its sale.Footnote 22 Perhaps not incidentally, the year 1864 also saw the creation of an Egyptian Ministry of Public Works, which effectively enforced the regulations (the law of tanẓīm)Footnote 23 that two decades earlier Muḥammad ʻAlī had instituted for Cairo. Shortly afterwards, in 1868, the draft law of Public Works Minister ʻAlī Mubārak represented another landmark in regulating construction (at least in Cairo).Footnote 24 In a few years’ time, as emerges from later testimony, only a few ancient vestiges of Cairo would remain in place. Nearby, a ‘new city’ would spring up. Neighbourhoods would be pierced by large thoroughfares, boulevards and squares framed by European-style dwellings offering pleasurable promenades.Footnote 25 By reorganizing the physical elements of the Egyptian city, officials sought to reorganize the society which had created those elements.Footnote 26

It has been argued that, between 1859 and 1869, the Company was the sole entity responsible for health issues and that it began sharing tasks in this realm with the Egyptian government only at the end of this decade.Footnote 27 Historians have claimed that the Company had been, since the time of its preliminary agreements with the Egyptian government in the late 1850s, keen on applying ‘strict hygienic measures’ in order to ensure the well-being of its workforce. Allegedly, the sanitary organization it had put in place had made the canal area a privileged Egyptian region from the standpoint of public health.Footnote 28 Natalie Montel, while claiming that health was one of the first concerns of the Company, allows for some ambiguity. First, she explains that Company officials may have been concerned with countering accusations of lack of salubriousness on the Isthmus precisely because that was a deficiency that the enterprise’s detractors liked to point out. Secondly, Montel acknowledges that the Company’s health service may have been driven by the double goal of undertaking construction in the best conditions while minimizing costs.Footnote 29 While Céline Frémaux agrees with Montel that the Company had an economic interest in maintaining general health, the former emphasizes what she interprets as the Company’s readiness to finance and support technical progress in matters of sanitation early on.Footnote 30 Only historian Mohamed Gamal-Eldin has so far ventured into the actual streets of the Isthmus towns to write the tangled history of social inequality, infrastructure and disease.Footnote 31 By looking at people’s prosaic efforts to dodge excrement and skip filthy puddles, this article builds on his work to counter aseptic views of Company-led sanitation initiatives in early Port Said. A less fragrant version of life on the worksites emerges from an archive of excrement, cobbled together with sources as varied as consular reports, court records, correspondence with local government officials, published travellers’ accounts and the contemporary press. Moreover, this article shows that the Egyptian government may have been more knee-deep wading through dirt than previously acknowledged.

I will go away when I am done: living with excrements

Port Said was literally made of refuse. Like cities elsewhere that recycled excavated material from moats, demolition rubble and mud, Port Said was built with the waste produced by the artificial embankment operations that had transformed its marshy areas into developable land.Footnote 32 As the digging of the basins and of the canal progressed, more and more mud and sand were removed from the excavated areas and distributed in other, lower areas, so that the ground level was raised and the soil was readied for construction. As soon as new surface was created, novel constructions were raised.Footnote 33 Therefore, the town’s foundations consisted chiefly of materials excavated from the canal.Footnote 34 The surface of the town being flat, moreover, and only four to five feet above sea level, combined with the fact that the soil was composed of sand and tended to be moist, meant that Port Said’s ground retained almost all its wastewaters (see Figure 1) and faecal matters (in the sources indicated in French as matières fécales). In the hotter months especially, ‘miasmatic effluvia’ wafted out of this lingering waste and were believed to cause infectious diseases.Footnote 35 The long sickness of Mr Cohen’s children, for example, was blamed on the ‘harmful exhalations’ that the yard of a nearby house let out. Its tenants had no cesspools for the draining of their dirty water and reportedly had no choice but to discard all their refuse in their yard.Footnote 36 While observers were right in identifying contaminated water as a cause of disease, it was not the odours of wastewater that triggered it, but rather the bacteria or viruses that thrived within it.Footnote 37 Whether real or perceived, the effects of ordure and odour lingered in people’s hearts and noses.

Figure 1. Street in Port Said, north of the Suez Canal. AVQ-A-000894-0035. Archivi Alinari, Florence, P.Z. Photoglob & Co. 1900–10.

Some contemporaries praised the Company for having triumphantly organized the Isthmus encampments by reconciling climate and hygiene.Footnote 38 Yet, an insalubrious environment may have actually enveloped its denizens. The sea water appears to have been the early town’s privileged dumpster. The canal water itself was tainted with pieces of soot.Footnote 39 The waves lapping up Port Said’s beaches must have been less transparent than it was fancied by those later proclaiming the beauty of these shores.Footnote 40 Not only did the town’s slaughterhouse, located near its northern beach, emanate bad smells but it also inundated the beach with a stream of fresh blood. When the shore withdrew, the facility became distant from the water which could no longer wash away the trickling filth.Footnote 41 The low tide was generally associated with pestilential exhalations that daily, morning and evening, affected the populace and elicited complaints. The receding water exposed trash (see Figure 2) especially in that ‘part of the port touching on the pier of the Maison Bazin where for many years a remarkable part of the city’s garbage [was] left’.Footnote 42

Figure 2. Quai in Port Said, undated. Johann Strauss’ personal collection.

The sea water also received the discharge of thousands of bowels, the amount of which kept multiplying given that the initial town’s headcount of 2,000 in 1860 hit 10,000 in 1869 and continued to grow exponentially.Footnote 43 Each person, it would be calculated for Ismailia, produced 4 litres of excrement per day hence almost 1,460 litres per year.Footnote 44 Calculations of this kind were gross approximations that depended on floating definitions of bodily ejections. For example, Cairo’s population of 450,000 inhabitants, it was gauged in 1874, produced 225,000 tons of faeces annually: half a ton, hence 500 litres, per inhabitant per year or between 1 and 1.5 litres per day.Footnote 45 A more constipated computation assessed that one person’s faecal production amounted to only 750 grammes per day or 275 kilos per year.Footnote 46 Whatever the figures, the principle that the very active movement of vessels in the harbour waters would produce an agitation sufficient to shake up harmful liquids (those that remained after all solid matter had been disposed of otherwise) would prove long-lasting.Footnote 47 But the Mediterranean also gave back, as when it washed ashore the corpses of the drowned or of those who had been killed by cholera on board, their bodies discarded overboard.Footnote 48 The desert, too, would later be weighed up as a point where materials could be conveniently deposited, possibly at slightly elevated locations so that the layers of underground water would not be affected by their trickles.Footnote 49 After all, the same was happening in coeval Istanbul, where two rivers, the Dolapdere and Baruthane, and then the Golden Horn and the Bosporus themselves served as open sewers.Footnote 50 Contemporary Alexandria and Cairo witnessed similar processes: in the former, watery refuse was drained out to sea; in the latter, a portion of the sewage was drained into the Khalig Canal while the greater bulk was carried out into the desert beyond the ‘Mokattum [sic] hills’.Footnote 51 In the vision of the Minister of Public Works ʻAlī Mubārak, Cairo ought to appear as a model for other Egyptian centres.Footnote 52

In the 1860s, streets across the Isthmus of Suez were also encumbered with trash. People throughout the Isthmus routinely discarded the dirt of their homes in the streets. In the Al Guisr worksite – described as a jumble of tents, huts and houses – inhabitants resisted ‘taking their waste outside of the homes’, which raises the question: were they reluctant or unable to do it? Streets were also littered with decomposing debris, such as the camel carcasses scattered over Al Guisr.Footnote 53 Throughout the Isthmus, in fact, inhabitants used to kill, skin and chop animals within the perimeter of encampments, throwing and abandoning blood and remains in the street rather than burying them right away.Footnote 54 In Port Said, revelry and drunken brawls additionally left trails of broken glass.Footnote 55

Finally, dwellers were pouring into the yard of neighbouring houses (and perhaps their own as well) ‘all sorts of trash, sweepings and even materials’, possibly a euphemism for bodily dejections.Footnote 56 To avoid such inconvenience, they may have attempted to ease themselves away from their own residences. By seeking out vacant plots on which they could urinate and defecate, they shared the same discomfort with a growing urban population and tighter living spaces as the inhabitants of coeval Cairo, where vacant plots within the city were littered with human excrement.Footnote 57 Many in Port Said (so many that they appeared to embody the town’s entire population) apparently used to go to ‘fulfil some natural needs a few metres away from the façade of the [French] consulate at all times of the day and of the night’. The exasperated consulate guards did try to chase the unwelcome visitors away but to no avail. The individuals whose main goal was to liberate their bowels would drily respond: ‘I will go away when I am done.’Footnote 58

The proximity to excrement and its wafts were a constant feature of urban life in early Port Said, because inhabitants suffered from the lack of viable alternatives. On a Saturday night in 1875, for instance, a certain Mustapha had placed several barrels of manure near the house of a man called Vincenzo Salomone, possibly a Maltese. The barrels were supposed to be transported south to Ismailia, another canal town further south, on the following day. But on Sunday afternoon they were still there. To add insult to injury, one of the barrels was damaged and the contents were leaking out. When Mustapha passed by, a confrontation with Salomone, standing outside of his own door, ensued (verbatim):

- Did you put them there?
- Yes, but they are to be sent off today.
- Then you shall eat it.

At that point, Mustapha testified, Salomone took hold of him, tried to shove him down on the contents of the barrel and tore off the sleeve of his coat. Mustapha managed to run away. Salomone, on his part, testified that he had applied to the Municipality to have the barrels removed and justified his annoyance so: ‘I told him it was impossible to wait as my wife was pregnant and had been very ill from the horrible smell proceeding from the barrels.’ What is more, when one of the barrels was removed from its place, more of the contents flowed right into Salomone’s residence.Footnote 59 Whether Salomone reacted violently or not and whether contemporaries conceived of the smell of manure as actually polluted air or simply as an aggravation of morning sickness, we may at the very least surmise that bad odour was a shared and common plight.

Indeed, Salomone thought the presence and stench of manure were sufficient grounds to complain to the local authorities. What did Salomone mean by ‘Municipality’ at this time? He probably referred to the tanẓīm or voirie (road maintenance and cleaning department) service that, three years prior, in 1872, had passed from the Company to the Egyptian governorate.Footnote 60 The locally dispatched representatives of the Egyptian sanitary authorities were vocal in denouncing the unsatisfactory state of the town’s hygiene and relayed their complaints to the Company. The surroundings of the lighthouse, they lamented in April 1866, were ‘dirty, of the kind of dirt that makes even approaching impossible, given how dirty it is in front, behind, and all around’. Moreover, shop-owners at both the Arab and the Greek bazaars in town, who were already paying a five-piasters’ fee for the cleanup of the space in front of their venues and the adjacent street, were exhorted to do more to maintain their premises. Finally, suspicious trickles poured from the hallways of latrines into the ‘public street’ and exuded nefarious smells that affected everyone. Overall, the sanitary situation of the town was grossly threatening public health, something that the summer months would only exacerbate.Footnote 61 The main concern of the local authorities was preventing the spread of cholera, whose deadly effects were still on everybody’s mind given the outbreak in the year prior, 1865, and the workers’ fright and flight from the canal worksites that followed.Footnote 62

Repression, removal, responsibility

Company officials, at this stage, seemed to have been unable to intervene effectively and were unwilling to consider their firm responsible for the town’s sanitary state. In a report that they drafted in May 1866 to respond to the Egyptian prefect’s urgings, they tailored for themselves only a monitoring role and hurried to inculpate others for the general filthiness. First, they accused the ‘great agglomeration of men who do nothing but soil’ found in the Egyptian barracks. Almost 200 men, they wrote, were crowded in one single establishment. In the same yard, they cooked their food, did their laundry and discarded food garbage, greasy and soapy waters, as well as the sweepings from their rooms. All this, it was argued, was ‘clearly infectious’. Once again, people may have had to resort to alternative locations to ease themselves: the more shelter these offered the better. The lighthouse, for example, was a place for depositing materials and large pieces of machinery, which had reportedly turned it into an attractive latrine for the men living and working nearby. Another deposit of construction materials had similarly metamorphosed into an open-air toilet. The merchants of the bazaar nearby also used to take shelter behind heaps of sand, bricks and rubble to relieve themselves.Footnote 63

What Company officials mainly recommended to address the urge that moved the town’s bowels was repression and removal, possibly at the Egyptian administration’s expense. They evoked the Egyptian local authority by urging the local prefect to organize the hundred men under his control into permanent patrols and to fine all those who were caught easing nature ‘on the public street’. Moreover, they wrote, surveillants ought to operate within workers’ lodgings to keep an eye on the men’s rooms and their yard. As for the vacant plots that had become open-air latrines, they were to be closed and covered in sand. A cesspool could be established over a barge moored on the dock, at a point where it did no harm to the circulation of boats. The sea, once again, conveniently functioned as the town’s ultimate sink and was supposed to swallow or carry the undesirable away. More effective sweepers ought to take care of the market areas, where, as soon as their cleanup had been performed, shopkeepers and customers alike started again disseminating rubbish like vegetable peels and dead beasts. The two labourers who had been in charge of cleaning the bazaars were allegedly doing more harm than good, since they were apparently moving the product of their sweepings away from the markets simply to push it into the neighbouring streets.Footnote 64 Therefore, the Company found it necessary to suggest that a (Company) agent in each locality would monitor such habits and a squad of sweepers would collect garbage each evening or in the early morning hours.Footnote 65

Finally, Company officials called on inhabitants to take on their share of responsibility. They regretted treating the populace with persuasion rather than compulsion, since the former approach had clearly failed to shelter the Company from the complaints of the Egyptian authorities. As in contexts elsewhere, private citizens were now expected to sort through their waste and assign it to its rightful place.Footnote 66 They were to sweep around their own houses and dispose of their dirt into boxes placed under the stairs or against the wall, so that prefect-appointed personnel should only be tasked with the emptying of cesspools and the removal of trash and sidewalk sweepings.Footnote 67 Residents had to urinate in or bring their urine to latrines (cabinets d’aisance). They were no longer allowed to let trickle or dispose of soapy, greasy or industrial waters in the streets or yards. Instead, they ought to dispose of them in wells that they were to provide and pay for themselves (such wells ought to be filled with dry-stone and covered with a layer of gravel and then a layer of sand). Finally, people should place the waters discarded from stables and manure in pits that were as far from dwellings as possible.Footnote 68 Inhabitants were thus expected to relieve themselves in the right places, to promptly carry their dejections to designated spots, maintain their residence distinct from the place where waste was to be discarded, and work in tandem with the appointed cleaning crews.

By 1871, the latrines that could be found in town consisted of ‘tubs made up of half-barrels placed in small inlaid niches’ carved in wood and placed along the roads. These were emptied at night two or three times per week.Footnote 69 Presumably, it was Egyptian authorities who appointed the necessary personnel and organized their work. However, when it came to the emplacement of such facilities, it was not at all clear who ought to be involved. ‘As far as latrines (lieux d’aisance) are concerned’, the Company engineer-in-chief declared in 1866, ‘I do everything I can to force the concession-holders to create them on their lands, but not much can be done as I cannot oblige them.’Footnote 70 Yet, notwithstanding the Company’s purported inability to act, the local sanitary authorities were still trying to find an agreement with the Company, ‘to which most of the houses in the city of Port Said belong[ed]’, to replace the current latrines with definitive and suitably built cesspools (fosses d’aisance). As for the owners who were external to the Company, the governor was to find a convenient way to force them to comply.Footnote 71

All in all, the Egyptian authorities’ call that a prompt solution to Port Said’s defective state be found in the interest of the whole population went mostly unheeded.Footnote 72 In 1872, the tanẓīm or voirie service passed from the Company to the local Egyptian authority embodied in the governorate.Footnote 73 Around 1874, residents were still littering the streets with kitchen scraps and not picking up the refuse of roaming animals.Footnote 74 They continued to dump their household waters in the streets, where they were absorbed into the sand and, evaporating, left a residue of decomposing organic matter.Footnote 75 When it came to easing themselves, inhabitants could resort to a hodgepodge of at least three different systems. First, there were the above-mentioned cesspools (fosses d’aisance). These ought to have been perfectly airtight, provided with a ventilation shaft and with pipework that had a hydraulic shut-off. They needed to be emptied out at night, between midnight and 5 am. Their contents ought to have been deposited on the above-mentioned barge to be anchored at a designated spot in the harbour. Second, those people residing in houses with no cesspools had to provide themselves with mobile tubs (tinettes). A model of such tubs was available at the office of the voirie. The voirie was in charge of collecting these tubs when they were full of faecal matters and immediately replace them with empty ones. Finally, owners could still resort to a third system of waste disposal: the cesspits (puits perdus). Having an above-mentioned tub did not deprive them of the ‘right’ to establish cesspits. They only needed to make sure to dig them as deep as needed to reach below a layer of clay under which ‘special men, engineers and doctors of Port Said’ had declared there was a stream of running water delivering materials to the sea.Footnote 76 Once more, Mediterranean waters appeared to be a most convenient hideout.

In 1875, the Egyptian Khediviate had gone bankrupt and had been placed under tight French and British financial and political control.Footnote 77 Health indeed became one of the sites for heightened competition between Britain and France, especially in 1876 with the reintroduction of a British member into Egypt’s ‘Sanitary Council’.Footnote 78 In 1877, the service in Port Said once again changed hands. It was entrusted to the domaine commun, whose administrator was a man called Poilpré.Footnote 79 Poilpré technically responded to both the Egyptian ruler and to the Suez Canal Company. But Poilpré was in an impossibly neutral position. He had been in the hire of the Company since at least 1863, when he occupied the role of ‘chief of central accounting’.Footnote 80 Hence, the domaine commun was, at this time and until 1884, essentially under the control of the Company, which was reluctant to relinquish the privileges acquired with the original concessions of 1854 and 1856.Footnote 81 The bill, however, was on the Egyptian government. By 1878, it was disbursing 1,750 francs every month for Poilpré and Mr D’Angeli, chief of the voirie in Port Said, to run this service.Footnote 82 To add to the ambivalence, they were all the while expected to be in charge of the execution of regulations issued by the governor general of the Isthmus.Footnote 83 While the voirie itself did not stand for the Municipality as a whole, its transfer to the Company’s purview in 1877 essentially meant that the Egyptian government abandoned ‘part of its public powers entirely in the hands of a private company’, as the dismayed French consul in Port Said himself acknowledged.Footnote 84

Faeces matter

Excrements are slippery objects of inquiry. They are seldom mentioned, often tiptoed around. Written sources either handle them with euphemisms or shun them out of prudishness, shame or exaggerated fear of their noxious effects.Footnote 85 Yet, calling poop out loud can have a liberating effect that turns oppression and guilt into laughter.Footnote 86 Excreta are only apparently trifling matters, yet they bear the traces of events that could not be otherwise observed.Footnote 87 They demand consideration of the mundane and seemingly apolitical dimension of everyday life. They show up in archival trickles that, if followed up seriously, point to what political and economic histories may have swiped out of plain view. Between 1859 and 1869, the Suez Canal Company may not have been at all that concerned or effective in its management of public hygiene in the encampments and towns sprouting along the canal. The Egyptian government may not have been impactful either, which, however, does not necessarily imply that it was unconcerned.

The new Suez Canal towns were in good company. In camps housing indentured workers globally, elementary sanitary measures such as water supply, drainage and waste removal were often poorly enforced before 1900.Footnote 88 Moreover, at the turn of the nineteenth century, the easiest and cheapest means of disposal was still to funnel raw sewage into waterways, as it had been in times prior, deferring the problem downstream.Footnote 89 Coastal cities, such as populous New York, dumped excreta into the Atlantic in the belief that the currents swept most of the discharge out to sea. It still did so in 1914, when it counted as many as six million inhabitants.Footnote 90 It took 50 years of discharging raw sewage into the Seine River for French authorities to change strategy and opt for treating waste first.Footnote 91 Not even Paris, with its reconstructed sewer system and Haussmanian urban remodelling, marched straight towards modernity.Footnote 92 In London, too, whose underground sewer system carrying waterborne human waste would become the prototype of modern sewerage, the breakthrough came after years of dumping raw sewage into nearby bodies of water.Footnote 93 As similarly exemplified by several of the other urban centres discussed in this special issue, for example Iquitos, Odessa, New Orleans and Lagos, late nineteenth-century debates over disease causation, sanitary technology and the provision of municipal sanitation were anything but unified.Footnote 94 Competing conceptions of the most appropriate means to regulate the flow of water in cities co-existed.Footnote 95

Places in nineteenth-century Egypt as a whole, ranging from Cairo to Tanta, experienced new ways of perceiving public space and reorganizing society.Footnote 96 As in cities around the globe, contamination, pollution and hygiene became prominent themes related to the built environment and the creation of a ‘healthy’ population, free from disease and disorder.Footnote 97 Official decrees and regulations, echoing the accounts of contemporary travellers, described Egyptian urban space as chaotic, overcrowded and fetid. It appeared as a space to be cleaned, ordered, disciplined. Miasmatic theories on the spread of disease informed official concerns on public health and the city’s smells. Cesspools, slaughterhouses, cemeteries, marshes and stagnant water pools all came to be conceived as potential sources of putrid air released from decomposing bodies. Out of concern with the spread of epidemics, new notions of public health and developing theories of domestic hygiene, the Egyptian administration built new neighbourhoods, cleaned Cairo’s streets and regulated proper discharge of domestic refuse.Footnote 98 Nineteenth-century Egypt saw the unfolding, as locales elsewhere, of the process by which bodily ejections would be disposed of in a ‘private’ space, funnelled away with an increased reliance on water and obliterated together with their smells.Footnote 99

In Port Said (where the Company obtained the tanẓīm or voirie in 1869, lost it to the governorate in 1872, obtained it again in 1877 under the guise of the domaine commun and then dominated it until 1884–85, when relations between the Company and Egypt become ‘normalized’Footnote 100), identifying the best route to dispose of excrement and trash, getting rid of odours, finding a suitable junkyard, all began as relatively minor headaches in 1859–69 and gradually swelled into enormous challenges in the decades to follow. In local newspapers, Port Saidians kept complaining about the general filth of their town.Footnote 101 In particular, Le Courrier de Port-Saïd, founded in 1874, was concerned with ‘health issues’ (al-ʾumur al-ṣiḥḥiyya): for example, it undertook a ‘massive campaign’ against the employees of the Customs, accused of tossing dirty water and garbage from the upper floor of their building into the back alley and the surrounding streets.Footnote 102

A sewage project in Port Said was prepared by a small staff starting in April 1909.Footnote 103 It was to start in 1911 and come to fruition in 1912.Footnote 104 Creating the connections needed to form a waste disposal circuit remained a long-lasting problem, one difficult to solve and posing sustained inconveniences.Footnote 105 After 1882, British colonial anxieties about the health of locally residing foreigners and the recurrence of disease outbreaks would largely dictate sewer projects, at least in Cairo.Footnote 106 This article has not tackled Port Said’s transition into outright colonial control or the development of its uneven infrastructure: the town’s so-called ‘Arab village’ housed an ‘Arab population’ whom the Company deemed to be a priori unfamiliar with cesspools (fosses d’aisance) and generally unconcerned with modern hygienic contraptions.Footnote 107 Westerners came to Egypt equipped with pre-conceptions about the exotically sensuous East with its base corporeality.Footnote 108 As pointed out by Warwick Anderson, colonizers saw the colonized as dangerously wallowing in excrements, lacking self-control and needing guidance toward self-government of body and polity.Footnote 109 Nor has this article dealt with the fact that rules around waste disposal could not be applied evenly to Egyptian and foreign subjects, the latter of whom were exempt from local jurisdiction and littered around seemingly unfazed.Footnote 110 Finally, the present work has only hinted at officials’ concerns with disease containment and lightly touched on the role of local authorities and forms of municipal power. All these are histories deserving a separate and ampler treatment.

For the time being, not much could comfort Port Said’s sick children or nauseous pregnant women. The situation in town remained malodorous and marked by missteps: ‘in some parts of the town the stenches make you feel bad’, wrote a visitor in 1871.Footnote 111 Olfaction and the perception of dirt, as shown by many already, is far from being a biological given. People of the past were not inexplicably indifferent to dirt and odour, as alluded to by Lewis Mumford.Footnote 112 Rather, notions of stink and waste have fluctuated and changed meaning in time, as has the boundary separating desirable smells from repulsive ones.Footnote 113 It is not up to the contemporary nose or to the ‘colonizing nostril’ to impose categories.Footnote 114 Moreover, focusing only on the successful steps taken by authorities in matters of public health risks amounting to writing what Jacob Steere-Williams calls a results-based ‘winner’s history of public health’ disregarding the impact of local and potentially maladroit efforts tackling those matters.Footnote 115 A history of sanitation reduced to the technological innovation spearheaded by a few male visionaries ends up writing ‘bodies and discourse out of the story’.Footnote 116 Instead, tracing ‘narratives of hygiene, disease, flooding, and lack of access to infrastructural systems’, as suggested by Gamal-Eldin, enables the historian to actually ‘excavate subaltern experiences’ out of the Company’s archive.Footnote 117 Finally, paying attention to smell points at some of the ways urban denizens themselves experienced their rapidly changing surroundings.Footnote 118 Perhaps, the historian who dabbles in excrement and emphasizes its pervasiveness falls into the nineteenth-century sanitarian’s obsession with dirt and smell. But while she is at it, she nags us: of Port Said, it could be unceremoniously declared that – as a tourist guidebook did in 1876 – there was ‘nothing in particular to see in town’.Footnote 119 There may not have been much to visit in Port Said, but there definitely was a lot to sniff out.

Acknowledgments

I would like to thank Nancy Reynolds and the other members of the 2021–22 Global Urban History mentorship programme for their critical engagement with previous versions of this work. I also want to thank my colleagues and unfailing sources of inspiration Mohamed Gamal-Eldin, Will Hanley and Pelle V. Olsen. I am grateful to Zachary Lockman for chairing a Middle East Studies Association panel in 2018 and gently prodding me to dig deeper. The members of the History Department’s writing group and Mark Stoll at Texas Tech University provided key feedback early on. Finally, I am thankful to the participants and the organizers of ‘Cities in Context(s). Annual History Seminar’ at the American University in Cairo in March 2023: Pascale Ghazaleh and Amina Elbendary.

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75 J.-B. François, Port-Saïd, son hygiène et sa constitution médicale (Paris, 1874), 14.

76 CADN, ARCFPS, C149, Projet de règlement police Port Said et Ismailia, n.d. possibly 1874.

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Figure 0

Figure 1. Street in Port Said, north of the Suez Canal. AVQ-A-000894-0035. Archivi Alinari, Florence, P.Z. Photoglob & Co. 1900–10.

Figure 1

Figure 2. Quai in Port Said, undated. Johann Strauss’ personal collection.