Welcome
Aleppo speaks
Issues
Diary, Oct. 2007
Aleppo soap, little green friends
The making of soap
Aleppo´s history
Diary, Oct. 2007

Soap story - part two


A short general History of Soap

From the beginning of the old phases of the Stone Age, water and sand would do for peoples' hygienic requirements. Hunter-gatherers lived in small groups. When tracking their preys, they simply left their codswallop at their old place. But when people started to settle in the area of what is Israel, Lebanon, Syria, Turkey, Iraq, Iran, and Jordan these days, they faced new challenges. Clothes were now made of animal coats and plant fibres in a pretty labourious way, as killing goats, cattle, and sheep for the mere purpose of using their coats was now considered a waste. During their lifetimes, animals supplied valuable wool, milk - and labour (especially in the case of cattle).
To conserve the cloth, and to keep the clothes lice within bearable numbers, some more tidiness was necessary. Water can remove a lot of stuff from clothes and skin: sand, salt from sweat, or dust, for example. But he removal of adipose just by use of water is either extremely difficult, or just impossible.

Aleppo soap on offerThe Sumerians had some knowledge of chemistry already. They solubilised pot ash in water and thus created base. Potash is ash from plants with a high concentration of potassium. These simple base formula were further developed by adding plant oil, thus creating quite simple loft soaps. In Tello, a small town in Mesopotamia, a 4400 years-old formula for such soap has been found. But if these «soaps» were already used for hygienic or medical purposes remains contended.

From the Sumerian cultural area, knowledge about the manufacture of these remedies reached Egypt and Greece. In Egypt, Soda was found to be a useful washing agent, too. Soda, as a mineral, was extracted from the desert or desiccated salt lakes, or from the process of burning sea plants containing sodium chloride. Obviously, in addition to soda, these ashes contained pot ash, too. Also, some 2600 years-old papyrus contain some evidence that fats or oil had been mixed and boiled with soda.

But it took time, up to the Roman era, before much interest was shown in the cleaning and therefore aesthetic effect of these formula. Up to then, people around the Mediterranean cleaned their skin by rubbing it with olive oil and then removing this oil - plus dust and sweat - with the aid of some kind of sweat scraper. This wasn´t just time-consuming, but expensive, too. Undies as we know them weren´t common back then, and the outerwear was cleaned by urine specialists. That sounds sort of disgusting, but it was probably a lack of pot ash that made this approach necessary. Wood had already become a scarce article, in the ancient world. The basic ammonia replaced the same substance from pot ash. The work was usually done by slaves or impoverished Roman citizens, and the laundry owners became so filthy stinking rich that an envious emperor, Vespasian, wanted to raise taxes on public urinals (which were connected to the laundries by pipelines). That famous quote, pecunia non olet, is supposed to have been coined in this context.

For the free Roman citizens, soap was an exorbitant luxury, and even in the upper classes, probably no one would use these costly cosmetical products for ordinary cleaning or laundry. But then again, some sources suppose that from the second century, soap wasn´t only used as hair fixature or as a bleaching agent, but indeed as a washing agent, too. More likely, it seems, this sort of pomade was meant to help avoid head lice.

It was the Arabs who started boiling larger quantities of oil and base during the 7th and 8th century, thus creating the kind of soap we know. They produced solid potash soap by causticising soda or pot ash with calcium hydroxide, i. e. making it basic. It had now become possible to manufacture soap, which main purpose was its use as bath soap.

Aleppo Soap CatBoth soap and bath houses had become popular in Europe during the Middle Ages. They fell from European grace by the 18th century. The reasons were probably simple enough - and soap and bathing was hardly to blame. After all, bath houses often served as brothels, too. When syphilis came to Europe with the beginning of the modern times, bath houses were blamed for it. Also, protestantism didn´t excel in terms of sensuality, either. Lack of hygiene is often blamed when describing the plagues of the late middle ages. But that is hardly the most obvious explanation. In the case of most infections, hygiene doesn´t play that much of a role. Neither the rat flea as a carrier of the bubonic plague, nor HIV, influenza viruses, pox viruses, yellow fever or malaria mosquitos, nor cholera agents give a damn on hygienic circumstances. In the industrialised countries, plagues lost ground only after people were in the economic position to change their underwear regularly, when drinking water and sewage systems had been modernised, and medical science became what it is today. To make no mistake, there are dirt-based plagues like typhus, or infections like mange, trachoma, impetigo or leprosy. But plagues - let alone pandemics - don´t care about living standards.

By the middle of the 19th century, European laundry was still done the Sumerian way. Wood ash was filled into cloth bags and hung into washing tubs with hot water. What mattered for the laundresses was that they had soft water at their disposal - usually rainwater or surface water, as this reduced the consumption of base, and later of soap.

The boom of the cotton-based textile industry of the 19th century, and slavery in the Southern States, led to an increasing demand for soap. Cotton underwear was easy to be washed with soap. Fats from slaughterhouses and the use of local plant fibres couldn´t cope with this demand. Whaling and overseas plantations had to fill the gap. With input from chemists like Chevreul (France) and Berthollet (who discovered the bleaching and disinfecting effect of chlorine) helped to find economical artificial production procedures.

Soap had become an industrial mass product.

Still, in many households, loft soap was still made at home. Housewives used pot ash, linseed oil, hempseed oil, fish oil, and all that jazz. And just as in the old days, these soaps weren´t just cleaning agents, but cures, just as well. When I was a child, my grandmother (who was born in 1907) applied loft soap to abrasions and other injuries. The base removed sanies and inflammation.

Right in Granny´s year of birth, there was a great innovation in laundry. The first comprehensive washing powder reached the stores. Apart from soap powder, it contained bleaching agents and stabilisers. But the real great leap forward came with mass production of washing machines and spin driers, in the 1950s.

il professore

Welcome
Aleppo speaks
Issues
Aleppo soap, little green friends
The making of soap
Aleppo´s history
Diary, Oct. 2007