Let’s Talk About Soap!
Where did soap come from? Who were the first people to use it? What did it look like in antiquity? Did we always have bar soap?
The First Soap-Like Substances (2800–2200 BC)
Egypt, Mesopotamia, and Babylon (modern-day Iraq) are where historians have traced the earliest records of soap-like substances, dating back to roughly 2800–2200 BC. A Sumerian tablet even records a recipe—mixing fats or oils with alkaline ash to create a paste.
These early mixtures were used primarily to clean textiles and treat skin conditions. They were likely harsh and not designed for everyday personal hygiene.
Soap Before Soap Was Soap
In the 1st century, Pliny the Elder wrote that the Gauls used a substance called “sapo,” which they applied to their hair as a pomade—sometimes giving it a reddish tint. They mixed animal fats with beech ash to create a substance we would recognize today as a form of soap, though it appears to have been used primarily for cosmetic purposes.
While Gaul may have been an early adopter of this kind of material, records show that North African and Middle Eastern societies were using soap-like substances more deliberately for cleaning. Historians often point to soap as something discovered independently across multiple cultures, rather than invented in a single place.
The Mount Sapo Story (Probably a Myth)
You may have heard the story of Mount Sapo—the idea that animal fat and ash from sacrificial fires washed into a river, accidentally creating soap.
It’s a great story. It’s just probably not true.
There’s little historical evidence to support it, and even Pliny the Elder—one of our main sources on early soap—never mentions it. Like many origin stories, it’s likely a later myth used to explain something people already understood.
Rome: Bathing Without Soap
By the 2nd century, the Greek physician Galen, working in Rome, began recommending soap for cleansing the body. He observed that it could remove dirt and grime, though soap was still not widely used in Roman bathing practices at the time.
Instead, Romans typically used oils, pumice, and scraping tools to clean the skin.
Roman bathhouses were enormous, social, and highly engineered—but soap wasn’t central to the experience.
Refinement in the Islamic World
In the Islamic world, soap-making became more refined. Advances in alkaline chemistry—including the use of substances like quicklime—helped enable the production of more stable, and eventually harder, soap bars.
One of the earliest well-documented examples of solid soap comes from Aleppo in Syria—an olive oil–based soap enriched with laurel oil that is still produced today. Olive oil and laurel oil create long lasting and very hard soap bars. The lather is tighter and very conditioning. Traditional Aleppo soap is aged for months or years after production — the outside oxidizes to a dark brown while the interior stays green, and the bar continues to harden over time.
Aleppo and other cities in the region became major centers of soap production, supplying North Africa, the Middle East, and parts of Asia.
Soap Spreads West
This knowledge spread into Spain by the 8th century through the expansion into Al-Andalus.
By around the 11th century, similar olive-oil soaps were being produced in Spain, where they became known as Castile soap—likely influenced by earlier soap-making traditions from the Islamic world.
From there, soap-making continued to develop across Europe. Cities like Marseille would eventually standardize production and become major soap centers as well, incorporating fragrances into their products.
Bathing Traditions Around the World
Soap and bathing didn’t evolve in just one place—they developed across cultures in different ways.
Asia
In China, bathing traditions date back thousands of years, with early records describing regular washing routines and the later development of public bathhouses as social spaces. Plant-based saponins were also used as natural cleansers.
Africa
Many African cultures used herbal steam baths, clays, and plant-based cleansers. Studies in ethnobotany have identified dozens of plant species used as natural soap substitutes, rich in compounds like saponins that produce a cleansing lather. This knowledge contributed to the development of soaps like African black soap, made from plantain skins, cocoa pods, shea butter, and other regional ingredients.
Mesoamerica/ South America
In Mesoamerica, steam baths known as temazcal were used for both physical and spiritual cleansing. Mesoamericans may have also used native plants as natural cleansers, particularly those containing saponins, though the historical record is less explicit on their exact use.
In South America, particularly among Andean cultures like the Inca, bathing was often centered around natural water sources and ritual spaces. Archaeological evidence shows the use of ceremonial baths and water systems tied to purification and spiritual cleansing.
North America
Similarly, many Indigenous cultures in North America used plant-based saponins—such as yucca, soaproot, and agave—alongside natural water sources like rivers and lakes for bathing.
After Rome: The Fragmentation of Bathing in Europe
After the fall of the Western Roman Empire, bathing culture in Europe became more localized. Large public bathhouses declined, and practices varied widely depending on region.
Bathing didn’t disappear—but the infrastructure that supported large-scale, communal bathing did.
The Return of the Bathhouse
Meanwhile, in the Islamic world—across North Africa, Byzantium, and into cities like Timbuktu—bathhouses continued to flourish.
Hammams became central to daily life, serving as places of cleansing, social gathering, and spiritual reflection.
Over time, these bathing traditions influenced parts of Europe, where bathhouses began to reappear more prominently by the late medieval period.
Soap in America, Soap Expanded
For decades, colonists making soap would toil over a boiling hot cauldron
Because of this, early colonial soap making was small scale.
By 1830, William Colgate, founder of what would become the Colgate-Palmolive brand begins to sell individually wrapped soap bars from his factory in New York.
Germ theory was taking hold by the late 1800s and early 1900s in the States — but it had a long road getting there.
The American physician Oliver Wendell Holmes published a groundbreaking paper on handwashing in 1843 that was met with ridicule.
Soap was shifting from being just cosmetic, to life-saving.
Around this time, the American Civil War further expanded and standardized soap use.
This shift was influenced in part by Florence Nightingale's work during the Crimean War (1853–1856), where improved hygiene practices significantly reduced infection rates.
Her books circulated among Civil War nurses, and she corresponded with those establishing the US Sanitary Commission — though the full extent of her direct influence remains debated by historians.
Final Thoughts
Soap wasn’t invented once—it was discovered again and again.
Across different cultures, environments, and needs, people found ways to combine fats, oils, plants, and minerals into something that could cleanse the body.
This didn’t cover everything—but it gives us a foundation.
In the next post, we’ll explore what those suds on a bar of soap are actually doing, what a syndet is and why its not technically "true soap", and why soap is actually complex machinery, with many cogs and wheels working together to get you clean.