When Was Soap Invented? A Short History of Soap

Nobody knows exactly who made the first bar of soap. What we do know is that people were mixing fat and ashes into something that cleaned nearly 5,000 years ago, and that the basic recipe has hardly changed since. The story runs from Babylonian clay jars to Syrian olive groves, Spanish castles, a Boston candle shop and, eventually, your shower.

The short answer

Soap was invented at least 4,800 years ago in ancient Mesopotamia. Babylonian clay cylinders from around 2800 BCE held a soap-like substance, and a Babylonian tablet from around 2200 BCE records one of the oldest known soap recipes, made with water, alkali and cassia oil. Hard bar soap as we know it came much later, from olive oil soapmakers in the Middle East and Mediterranean during the Middle Ages.

Babylon, around 2800 BCE

The oldest evidence of soap comes from ancient Babylon, in what's now Iraq. Archaeologists found clay cylinders holding a soap-like residue, with inscriptions describing fats boiled with ashes. That's the same chemistry soapmakers use today. Ashes from burned plants contain an alkali, and when alkali meets fat, you get soap. The process is called saponification.

Around 2200 BCE, a Babylonian clay tablet wrote down a formula of water, alkali and cassia oil, a relative of cinnamon. It's one of the oldest written recipes of any kind. This early soap probably wasn't used much for bathing, though. It was more likely used to clean wool and cloth before dyeing.

Ancient Egypt, around 1550 BCE

The Egyptians bathed regularly, and the Ebers Papyrus, a medical document from around 1550 BCE, describes combining animal and vegetable oils with alkaline salts to make a soap-like substance for washing. Egyptians also used natron, a naturally occurring salt mixture, for cleaning and in mummification.

Greece and Rome

Here's a surprise. The Greeks and Romans, famous for their baths, mostly didn't wash with soap. They oiled their skin, then scraped the oil and dirt away with a curved metal tool called a strigil. Soap was something the people to the north used.

The Roman writer Pliny the Elder described soap made from tallow and ashes in the first century CE, and he credited the Gauls with inventing it, mainly as a hair pomade. The Latin word "sapo" gives us the word soap.

You may have heard that soap got its name from Mount Sapo, where rain supposedly washed animal fat and ashes from sacrifices into the river below. It's a nice story, but historians haven't found evidence that a Mount Sapo existed. It's best filed under legend.

By the second century, the Greek physician Galen recommended soap for washing, and soap was slowly becoming part of bathing in the Roman world.

Aleppo and the first hard bars

The soap you'd recognize, a hard bar that holds its shape, owes a lot to soapmakers in the Middle East. In cities like Aleppo, in present-day Syria, soapmakers boiled olive oil with lye from plant ashes, often adding laurel oil. They poured the soap onto the floor, cut it into blocks and stacked them to cure for months.

Aleppo soap has been made this way for many centuries, and it's still made there today. Writers and chemists in the medieval Islamic world documented soapmaking in detail, and soap with added scents and colors became a trade good across the region.

Castile, Marseille and Venice

The craft spread around the Mediterranean, and olive oil soap made a few places famous. In Spain, the Castile region became so well known for its pure olive oil soap that "castile" became the name for the style. It still means a soap made from olive oil, and it's how we make our own castile bars. Here's the story of castile soap in full.

In France, Marseille became a soapmaking capital. In 1688, under Louis XIV, a royal edict set rules for Marseille soap, including that only olive oil could be used. Venice and Savona in Italy were important soapmaking centers too.

Northern Europe, without olive groves, made soap from animal fats. It tended to be softer and smellier, and fine Mediterranean soap was a luxury that was traded across the continent.

Soap in the Middle Ages

Soapmaking became an organized trade in medieval Europe, with guilds that guarded their recipes. Soap was mostly used for laundry and for washing wool, and much of what ordinary people used was soft soap made at home from kitchen fat and wood-ash lye.

Daily bathing with soap wasn't a habit for most people. Soap was taxed in many places, and it was simply too valuable to use freely. England taxed soap from 1712 until 1853.

Colonial America and a Boston soapmaker

In colonial America, soapmaking was a household chore. Families saved kitchen fat all year and leached lye from hardwood ashes in a barrel, then boiled the two together into a soft, brown soap, usually in the spring.

It was also a business, and one of the best known soapmakers was right here in Massachusetts. Josiah Franklin, Benjamin Franklin's father, was a tallow chandler and soap boiler in Boston. Young Ben worked in his father's shop cutting wicks and filling candle molds before he left for his printing apprenticeship. His brother John later made a well-regarded soap of his own. As soapmakers working outside Boston ourselves, we're happy to claim the Franklins as part of the family business, at least in spirit.

Soap gets cheap

For most of history, the hard part of soapmaking was the alkali. Ashes were slow to process, and the results were inconsistent. That changed in 1791, when the French chemist Nicolas Leblanc patented a process for making soda ash from ordinary salt. Soapmakers could now turn soda ash into lye in large amounts.

In the 1820s, another French chemist, Michel Eugène Chevreul, worked out the chemistry of fats and how they turn into soap. Soapmaking went from a craft passed down through families to a science that factories could repeat.

When England finally repealed its soap tax in 1853, soap became an everyday product for ordinary people, and public health campaigns began to encourage washing with it.

The rise of the soap brands

The 1800s turned soap into big business and gave us names that are still on the shelf.

• 1837. Candlemaker William Procter and soapmaker James Gamble go into business together in Cincinnati, founding Procter & Gamble.
• 1879. P&G introduces Ivory, later sold as "99 44/100% pure" and as the soap that floats. We dug into the slogan in Dial vs. Ivory.
• 1884. In England, the Lever brothers launch Sunlight soap, one of the first wrapped and branded bars.
• 1898. Palmolive, made from palm and olive oils, arrives in Milwaukee.

Soap companies also became some of the biggest advertisers in the world. They sponsored radio dramas so often that the shows became known as "soap operas."

Detergents change everything

During World War I, Germany was short on fats, which were needed for food and for making explosives. Chemists developed synthetic detergents, cleansers made from other raw materials. After World War II, detergents took over laundry, starting with products like Tide in 1946.

They came to the bathroom too. In 1957, Dove launched as a "beauty bar" made mostly from synthetic cleansers instead of traditional soap, and it's still sold that way today. Here's why Dove isn't technically soap. Today, most body washes and many bars on the drugstore shelf are detergents, while true soap is still made the old way, from fats and lye.

The return of handmade soap

By the late 20th century, a lot of people had never used a bar of handmade soap. That started to change as small makers revived cold process soapmaking, the same basic method the Babylonians would recognize, now with careful measurements and better ingredients. Today there are handmade soapmakers in nearly every town, selling at farmers markets, craft fairs and online.

We're one of them. We make every bar by hand, in small batches in Massachusetts, from organic oils and lye. The tools have changed since Babylon, but the idea hasn't. Fat, alkali, water and a little patience. If you'd like to try it yourself, our guide on how to make soap walks you through your first batch.

A quick timeline of soap

Want to know what's in a bar today? Read what is soap made of, or browse the soap shelf to see where 4,800 years of practice has landed.