Soaps & Detergents both belong to the one genre. They are the reason we consider ourselves spotless as per dirt free. However they are not the invention of this century. Although they have been changed to quite an extent, their presence date back to older times. Now we have spotless clothing and clean room flooring, all thanks to the ancient Babylonians. They were the ones who originally discovered soap. If it wasn’t for them, we would have never known famous names like Dycem. Today, we feel the need and urgency for hygiene, but we are not quite different from the people of ancient times. It’s proven by excavation through ancient Babylon that its people used to store soaps in jug like cylinders. These clay jugs were found with inscriptions on them, reading that people used to make soap by boiling fats with ashes.

The Egyptians of the older times are not much different for example, the Ebers Papyrus reveal that the Egyptians used to make soap like thing by mixing animal fats with alkaline salts. Incidentally, they used this mixture for treating skin diseases. This is a really fascinating piece of information as soap is quite responsible for removing obnoxious disease causing agents from our skin. The existence of soaps could also be traced from the time of Moses. He specifically gave detailed laws regarding cleanliness and religious purity. The people of his time were also acquinted with this soap like thing which they used for their cleanliness.

Now let’s come to the era of the Greeks. As we all know, they were people of great artistic sense. They used to bathe themselves with clay rather than soap, and then they used to daub themselves with oil, before removing it with metallic strigil. This actually serve the cause of the soap. The Greeks also used the mixture of oil and ashes for washing their clothes.

Soap has been used through the ages, but it got its name ‘soap’ during the Roman era. At that time, there was a mount named ‘Sapo’ where animals were sacrificed and the rain used to take away animal lard along with wood ashes into the clay soil. The women cleaning clothes down the river found that this clay mixed substance made their wash easier and since that time, we refer to soap as soap.There was a period, which came with the decline of the Romans, when personal cleanliness and hygiene were ignored, and that greatly contributed to epidemics and plagues. With the conslusion of the 16th century, hygiene was back as a norm. This was the time when soap making was established as a skill in Europe. The soap makers at that time were very peculiar and used to guard their trade secret. But it couldn’t remain so due to the fact that civilizations around the world used it in different forms.

Soap as we know it today is more than a cleaning agent. Many varieties of soap are now used for purposes like bathing, laundering, shaving and shampooing. Many industries make huge sums by bringing changes to soap making while the actual ingredients are the same as those that were employed in earlier times.