Tepidarium in the context of "Lawrence Alma-Tadema"

A hammam (Arabic: حمّام, romanized: ḥammām), also often called a Turkish bath by Westerners, is a type of steam bath or a place of public bathing associated with the Islamic world. It is a prominent feature in the culture of the Muslim world and was inherited from the model of the Roman thermae. Muslim bathhouses or hammams were historically found across the Middle East, North Africa, al-Andalus (Islamic Iberia, i.e. Spain and Portugal), Central Asia, the Indian subcontinent, and in Southeastern Europe (notably Balkans and Hungary) under Ottoman rule.

In Islamic cultures the significance of the hammam was both religious and civic: it provided for the needs of ritual ablutions but also provided for general hygiene in an era before private plumbing and served other social functions such as offering a gendered meeting place for men and for women. Archeological remains attest to the existence of bathhouses in the Islamic world as early as the Umayyad period (7th–8th centuries) and their importance has persisted up to modern times. Their architecture evolved from the layout of Roman and Greek bathhouses and featured a regular sequence of rooms: an undressing room, a cold room, a warm room, and a hot room. Heat was produced by furnaces which provided hot water and steam, while smoke and hot air was channeled through conduits under the floor.

A caldarium (also called a calidarium, cella caldaria or cella coctilium) was a room with a hot plunge bath, used in a Roman bath complex.The boiler supplying hot water to a baths complex was also called caldarium.

This was a very hot and steamy room heated by a hypocaust, an underfloor heating system using tunnels with hot air, heated by a furnace tended by slaves. It was also the hottest room in the regular sequence of bathing rooms; after the caldarium, bathers would progress back through the tepidarium to the frigidarium.

The Thermes de Cluny (French pronunciation: [tɛʁm də klyni]) are the ruins of Gallo-Roman thermal baths lying in the heart of Paris' 5th arrondissement, and which are partly subsumed into the Musée National du Moyen Âge - Thermes et Hôtel de Cluny.