Soap

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