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Soap, which constitutes so important and indispensable an article in the domestic economy of the moderns, was quite unknown to the ancient inhabitants of Asia, and even of Greece. No allusion to it occurs in the Old Testament. In Homer, we find Nausicaa, the daughter of the King of the Phæacians, using nothing but water to wash her nuptial garments:

They seek the cisterns where Phæacian dames

Wash their fair garments in the limped streams;

Where gathering into depth from falling rills,

The lucid wave a spacious bason fills.

The mules unharness’d range beside the main,

Or crop the verdant herbage of the plain.

Then emulous the royal robes they lave,

And plunge the vestures in the cleansing wave.

Odyssey, vi. 1. 99.

We find, in some of the comic poets, that the Greeks were in the habit of adding wood-ashes to water to make it a better detergent. Wood-ashes contain a certain portion of carbonate of potash, which of course would answer as a detergent; though, from its caustic qualities, it would be injurious to the hands of the washerwomen. There is no evidence that carbonate of soda, the nitrum of the ancients, was ever used as a detergent; this is the more surprising, because we know from Pliny that it was employed in dyeing, and one cannot see how a solution of it could be employed by the dyers in their processes without discovering that it acted powerfully as a detergent.

The word soap (sapo) occurs first in Pliny. He informs us that it was an invention of the Gauls, who employed it to render their hair shining; that it was a compound of wood-ashes and tallow, that there were two kinds of it, hard and soft (spissus et liquidus); and that the best kind was made of the ashes of the beech and the fat of goats. Among the Germans it was more employed by the men than the women.88 It is curious that no allusion whatever is made by Pliny to the use of soap as a detergent; shall we conclude from this that the most important of all the uses of soap was unknown to the ancients?

It was employed by the ancients as a pomatum; and, during the early part of the government of the emperors, it was imported into Rome from Germany, as a pomatum for the young Roman beaus. Beckmann is of opinion that the Latin word sapo is derived from the old German word sepe, a word still employed by the common people of Scotland.89

It is well known that the state of soap depends upon the alkali employed in making it. Soda constitutes a hard soap, and potash a soft soap. The ancients being ignorant of the difference between the two alkalies, and using wood-ashes in the preparation of it, doubtless formed soft soap. The addition of some common salt, during the boiling of the soap, would convert the soft into hard soap. As Pliny informs us that the ancients were acquainted both with hard and soft soap, it is clear that they must have followed some such process.