Soap

We had been using soap for about 5000 years, from the time of Babylon. Three and a half thousand years ago, Egyptians regularly washed themselves with soap. The Romans didn't know about soap but used oil for cleaning themselves instead. The Egyptians also used a kind of soap to wash wool, prior to spinning and weaving. Later, the Romans manufactured soap from ashes and animal fat, but for hairdressing, not for cleaning. After the year 600, soap was mainly manufactured in Palestine and Iraq. On the first half of the 20th century, there were advertising campaigns to try to get people to use it. It was only in the late 19th century that you could buy bars of soap in the USA. Some Western countries were slow to use soap since personal hygiene wasn't considered so important. In Arab countries, soap was made from olive oil mixed with Sodium Lye, and the formula for soap has not changed much since then. Modern soaps are perfumed and colored, but so were those historic Arab soaps. Only by the 1950s was soap broadly accepted across North America and Europe as a necessity. After the Romans, the Germans and Gauls used soap in the same way: the men would use it in their hair to look fierce before they went into battle. We know that because a recipe for soap was found on a Babylonian clay tablet.