The Babylonians used ash and oil.
The Gauls used ash and tallow. The Vikings used ash and tallow. Aleppo used ash and olives. Marseille used ash and olives. Every factory in the Nordic countries up until the 1900s used ash and tallow.
It’s the same reaction. The same three ingredients in different proportions. The only difference between a Babylonian soap paste and a bar of cold-process beef tallow soap is that we have better equipment and worse memory.
Soap is not an alternative. Soap is not a niche. Soap is not nostalgia.
Soap is what we have been doing for 4,800 years.
What’s sitting in your bathroom — if it contains Sodium Lauryl Sulfate and fragrance — that’s the new thing. That’s the exception. That’s the seventy-year experimental state we’re still living in.
The Babylonians boiled fat with ash. The Romans acknowledged that it worked. The Vikings used it weekly. Aleppo turned it into an art. Marseille turned it into law. The industry of the 1800s turned it into a science. The war of 1914 turned it into a scarce commodity. The detergent of 1946 turned it into a grandmother’s choice.
But it never became wrong. It was just overruled.
If you want to go back to what works, you don’t go forward. You go back.
All the way… To Babylon.
Sources og noter
- Hele serien — samtlige kilder samlet i de individuelle indlæg
- Denne outro indeholder ingen nye fakta. Den samler det allerede etablerede.