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Aleppo has
prospered in the olive growing valleys of the
Fertile Crescent for
over 6,000 years.
Among its many ancient traditions, none is as proudly kept as the city's
renowned
Aleppo soap- regarded as the world's first hard soap.
The old-world, natural recipe has not changed in millennia, and is still
made by traditional fire-boiling, hand-milling, and an aging process that
lasts over one year.
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Babylonians in
Mesopotamia� are
credited with making the first
soap-like substance, however their cassia
oil concoction probably amounted to only a mild emulsion which would not
be recognizable as soap today.
It seems that the process of making soap as we know it was invented by the
Phoenicians who inhabited the modern lands of
Israel,
Lebanon, and
Syria.
They used a native crop, the
olive tree, and the alkaline ash of the tumbleweed,
"Salsola Kali" to turn the oil into soap.
The process was simple: After the tumbleweed had been reduced to ash, it was
mixed with slaked lime. This took the high level of sodium carbonate in the
ash, and turned it into sodium hydroxide- an alkali. This was boiled
with olive oil over a long period of time, and the oil was converted to soap
through a a chemical process called
saponification.
Since little record of these lands is known to the west today, the specifics
of exactly when and where in Phoenicia this process was invented is unknown. The only
surviving center of this ancient process is in Aleppo, which is
geographically ideal for soap making because all the raw materials are
close by, and the cool temperatures in the hill top city allow for high
volume soap production.
What makes Aleppo soap historically different form other soaps, is its
inclusion of Olive, and
Laurel oil, one of the most valued oils in
the region. It comes from the Laurel tree which grows around the
Mediterranean hills west of Aleppo.
Soap making spread from the Phoenician region after the
crusades. During
this time, Europeans came to conquer the "holy land"- roughly from Aleppo
south to
Jericho. When they left, many of them took the Aleppo soap making
process to Europe, namely Castile and Marseille, and changed the original
Olive and Laurel recipe to a pure Olive oil recipe which lacks many of the
distinct benefits of Aleppo soap.
Today, Aleppo soap is sold all around the world from Japan to France. It is
still made by the traditional processes. The only change is that instead of
the alkali produced by burning plants, a more environmentally sound process
of making it from sea salt is used. Laurel oil and Olive oil are still taken
from the same sources, and the soap works are still family run. |
