How Did People Clean Themselves Before Soap?

Soap has a long history and a straightforward formula. Despite the modern convenience of soap for scrubbing off dirt, sweat, and grime, humans had other methods before its invention.

For centuries, water was the primary means of bathing. For instance, the Indus Valley Civilization, thriving in present-day Pakistan, India, and Afghanistan from 2600 to 1900 B.C., featured the Great Bath in Mohenjo-daro, an early steam bath. However, steam bathing had its limitations.

Judith Ridner, a historian at Mississippi State University, noted that before soap became common in personal hygiene, many individuals likely had a strong odor. Basic soap is a simple concoction—a combination of an alkali (a water-soluble compound) and a fat. Kristine Konkol, a chemist at Albany State University, explained that soap molecules have a water-loving head and an oil-loving tail, which helps lift dirt.

Ancient civilizations used premodern soaps with essential ingredients such as plants, animal bile, oils, sand, and wood ash as exfoliants. These early soaps are challenging for historians to trace because soap degrades over time, as Seth Rasmussen from North Dakota State University pointed out.

The first written records of soap-like substances are around 2500 B.C. in Mesopotamia. Clay tablets suggest that the Sumerians used a combination of water and sodium carbonate for cleaning. Later, the Akkadian Empire used plants like date palm and pine cone, ingredients that align closely with modern soap components.

Surprisingly, ancient and modern soaps are fundamentally similar. People's methods for making soap likely stemmed from accidental discoveries, such as cleaning greasy pans with plant ash or boiling animal fats with wood ash. These techniques date back to Babylon and ancient Egypt, where ingredients like natron, clay, and talc-based soapstone were documented.

The ancient Greeks and Romans used a different method for bathing, involving scented olive oils and a strigil to scrape off grime. However, this was more about masking odor than actual cleaning. Often, these oils contained aromatic plant extracts.

These soapy mixtures were primarily used for cleaning textiles, treating it more as an industrial process than a personal hygiene one. It wasn't until the early to mid-1800s that bathing with soap became more common in the Western world, due to factors such as the advent of inexpensive fats, industrial soap production, and increased focus on sterilization in hospitals during the Civil and Crimean wars.

Overall, these factors culminated in the mass market for soap that companies like Procter & Gamble in the U.S. leveraged, as Ridner explained.

Earlier, SSP wrote that a century-old experiment ensured the future of beer and whiskey.