Aleppo, Castile, Marseille, Nablus — the Mediterranean turned soap into a regional art.
While Northern Europe washed on Saturdays, the Islamic world invented hard soap.
Aleppo in Syria. Olive oil, laurel oil, and lye from burned ash. The earliest written evidence is from the eighth century after Christ. That soap is still sold. The same recipe.
In the year 925 the Persian scholar al-Razi wrote a detailed description of how glycerin is released from olive oil during the soap process. Remember that name. We’ll come back to glycerin.
The Crusaders brought Aleppo soap back to Europe in the 1100s. It became one of the most traded goods between the Middle East and Europe. The Italians tried to copy it. The Spanish succeeded — Castile soap, named after the region of Castile, became Europe’s first famous hard bar.
By the 1300s the city of Nablus in Palestine had its own soap industry. Olive oil, local ash, and lime. UNESCO inscribed Nabulsi soapmaking on the list of intangible cultural heritage in December 2024. Every Palestinian family knows the recipe. They’ve done it for over a thousand years.
In 1688 Louis the Fourteenth’s finance minister Colbert issued an edict that defined Savon de Marseille. Pure olive oil only. No animal fat. Production banned in summer, because the heat degraded the quality. It wasn’t gourmet. It was France’s first consumer protection against soap adulteration.
Soap had become a regional art. Aleppo. Castile. Marseille. Nablus. Each with their own oil, their own ash, their own tradition.
While up here we still boiled ours in the scullery pot and poured it into clay jars.
It’s not because they were better. It’s because they had olive oil and soda-plant ash. We had animal fat and wood ash. That dictated what kind of soap we could make. One became a hard bar. The other stayed a soft paste.
It’s not culture. It’s botany.
Sources og noter
- Wikipedia — Aleppo Soap — 8. århundrede, olivenolie + laurbær-olie
- Wikipedia — Castile Soap — Spanien, kopi af Aleppo-princippet
- UNESCO — Nabulsi Soap Making (2024) — immateriel kulturarv
- Wikipedia — Marseille Soap — Colbert-edikt 1688
- al-Razi (854-925) — Kitab al-Asrar (Bog om Hemmelighederne) beskriver glycerin-udskillelse