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It's A Wash - Ep Dirt (ENCORE)
328 Plays3 years ago
(ENCORE) This week, Anna and Amber decided to clean up their act and take a look at the history of bathing and hygiene. We’re dipping our toes into Roman baths, sweating through Finnish and Russian saunas, discussing the shrewd marketing behind the “Halitosis Effect,” and more. Plus, what even IS soap, anyway?
Links
- A natural history of hygiene (Canadian Journal of Infectious Diseases and Medical Microbiology)
- Evidence that disgust evolved to protect from risk of disease (Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences)
- The First Soap - The first recorded evidence of soap making (Soap History)
- Out of the Vapors: A Social and Architectural History of Bathhouse Row
- More Than a Bath: An Examination of Japanese Bathing Culture (Claremont Colleges)
- Self-Reflection in the Tub: Japanese Bathing Culture, Identity, and Cultural Nationalism (Asia Pacific Perspectives)
- Dip into the history of the Japanese 'system bath' (Japan Times)
- Networking Naked With Finland's Diplomatic Sauna Society (The Atlantic)
- A `working' bath: Finland's answer to negotiations. SAUNA DIPLOMACY (Christian Science Monitor)
- The Standard Guide to Global Bathing Cultures (Standard Hotels)
- The History and Science Behind Your Terrible Breath (Smithsonian)
- Fighting bad breath -- a battle through centuries (Los Angeles Times)
- Who invented the toothbrush and when was it invented? (Library of Congress)
Contact
- Email the Dirt Podcast
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Transcript
00:00:00
Speaker
You're
Introduction to The DIRT Podcast
00:00:01
Speaker
listening to the Archaeology Podcast Network. The DIRT Podcast is brought to you with support from the Archaeology Division of the American Anthropological Association.
00:00:36
Speaker
Hello, and welcome to The Dirt, a podcast about archaeology, anthropology, and our shared human past. I'm Anna. And I'm Amber. And today's episode is sponsored by listener Paula, but not my mom, who says, quote, I've been to hummums in the Middle East and Central Asia, to saunas in Finland, and most recently to a seaweed baths in Ireland. I'd really love these.
00:00:59
Speaker
I'd really love for you to do an episode on the archaeology and anthropology of bathing, concepts of hygiene, and that kind of thing. In particular, why is this whole hot-cold cycle so popular, and where did it start? Yes, indeed. So clean out your ear holes, listeners. This week, we bring you a very brief history of personal hygiene. So let's start off with this.
The Science and Culture of Body Odor
00:01:22
Speaker
How do we know when we're dirty? I mean, unless you get to the level where you're like the Peanuts character Pigpen and you got dust clouds and visible stink lines coming off you, it's usually less of a visual cue and more of an olfactory one, right? Body odor.
00:01:37
Speaker
And just a note, much of this is going to come back to our old friend cultural relativism. Some cultures are hypersensitive to certain ideals of cleanliness, and those perspectives vary all over the world, so keep that in mind as we go. But a fundamental question, why do we humans react to certain types of body odors as icky?
00:01:58
Speaker
We don't, like dogs or cats, or actually most other mammals, probably, greet one another by sniffing butts. Typically, certain bodily human smells are perceived as unpleasant. Why? One theory is that the disgust reaction evolved as a way to protect against bacteria. So this is from the abstract of a paper by Val Curtis, Robert Unger, and Tamara Rabe, published in the Royal Society's Biology Letters. Quote,
00:02:26
Speaker
I never thought it would happen to me. Disgust? Disgust has happened to me.
00:02:35
Speaker
Okay, quote, discussed is a powerful human emotion that has been little studied until recently. Current theories do not coherently explain the purpose of disgust nor why a wide range of stimuli can provoke a similar emotional response. Over 40,000 individuals completed a web-based survey using photo stimuli. Images of objects holding a potential disease threat were reported as significantly more disgusting than similar images with little or no disease relevance.
00:03:05
Speaker
This pattern of response was found across all regions of the world. Females reported higher disgust sensitivity than males, there was a constant decline in disgust sensitivity over the life course, and the bodily fluids of strangers were found more disgusting than those of close relatives.
00:03:24
Speaker
These data provide evidence that the human discussed emotion may be an evolved response to objects in the environment that represent threats of infectious disease. And actually, as a point to add on to that, a lot of disgust is a culturally learned thing. So I think this is talking about a couple of different kinds of reaction because
00:03:45
Speaker
Maybe there's an evolutionarily evolved disgust reaction, or maybe the cultural passing on of the disgust reaction is the evolutionary response. But in any case, in humans, that disgust response doesn't really, at least in terms of food substances, doesn't happen until about age two, which is why
00:04:09
Speaker
kids will just kind of put anything in their mouth and they learn from mom and dad's reaction and the reaction of adults around them like, no, no, no, no, no, that's yucky. Don't eat that. So, so it's partially at least a learned behavior. So that's, it's really interesting.
Ancient Soapmaking Practices
00:04:24
Speaker
Well, the word hygiene itself comes from Hygea, the Greek, well, Hygea, the Greek goddess of health, who was the daughter of Escalapius, the god of medicine. Hey, hey. Since the arrival of the Industrial Revolution, which was sometime around 1750 to 1850 CE,
00:04:46
Speaker
And the discovery of germ theory of disease in the second half of the 19th century CE, hygiene and sanitation have been at the forefront of the struggle against illness and disease. But what about in the way, way back? It's probably safe to say that life as an early human or a Neanderthal was pretty stinky. But what is the earliest archaeological evidence for people cleaning themselves?
00:05:13
Speaker
Well, the first recorded evidence of soapmaking comes from Babylonian clay cylinders dating from about 2800 BCE. Inscriptions on those cylinders are the earliest known written soap recipe, and they describe a process by which fats could be combined with wood, ash, and water to create a substance capable of cleaning.
00:05:34
Speaker
The product thus produced was not necessarily used to wash the body. It might have been used to clean textile fibers such as wool and cotton in preparation for weaving into cloth. But before we go too much further, let's back up for a second. What even is soap? What is it? Technically, soap is a, quote, salt of a fatty acid, end quote. Helpful, right? Which sounds like an insult.
00:06:02
Speaker
use salt of a, well, yeah, like a Shakespearean, a vaguely Shakespearean. Oh, salt of a fatty acid. I stubbed my toe. Oh, I want to use that. Salt of a fatty acid. And that means that in the most basic sense, soap is any fat that has been mixed with alkaline salts.
00:06:21
Speaker
You can get those fats from plants or animals and the alkaline component can come from things like ash or lye. In the Iber's Papyrus, which we've mentioned before, it's that medical text from Egypt from about 1550 BCE, indicates that ancient Egyptians bathed regularly and combined animal and vegetable oils with alkaline salts to create a soap-like substance.
00:06:43
Speaker
Yeah. And I did find one reference that suggested that Neanderthals used tweezers like shell muscle shell or, you know, bivalve shell tweezers, but I don't know for, for like hair removal, I guess. Interesting. Yeah. So, but I didn't include that because I don't know. How do you definitively
00:07:07
Speaker
Yeah, so I wanted to stick to soap for that reason. Interesting. Okay. Well, in the wild ride that was the reign of Nubonidus, the neo-vavil... No, really. I know, just...
00:07:24
Speaker
It sounds like it's a book review. Three stars. He was a Neo-Babylonian king who reigned from 556 to 539 BCE. There was a recipe written down for soap, which consisted of ooh-hoo-loo, which is ashes, cypress oil and sesame seed oil, used for, quote, washing the stones for the servant girl.
00:07:54
Speaker
And I have no further information about that. I would guess that if we're washing stones with or by servants it would be for like laundry. That's what I imagined but it was like for like making sure the stones were clean so that when you rubbed the clothes on them to
00:08:16
Speaker
like in the sense of a washboard. Let's speculate. But also you need to remember that most of the people who determine the definitions for words like this didn't have a great sense of how like regular life works. Gotta wash them stones. Yeah, so they're like, that's what happens with laundry. So like you might not necessarily
00:08:44
Speaker
Fair point. It might not link to anything that happened in the sixth century BCE or the 19th century CE. More ever. But in ancient Israel, the ashes from borilla plants, so where you go to the pasta groves, ashes from borilla plants were used in soap production known as potash.
00:09:12
Speaker
or as young Amber read it, potash. I always thought it was potash too, is it not? I thought it was potash, like it's... Potash. Potash. Soap made from potash, which is itself just a concentrate of burnt wood or vegetable ashes mixed with lard or olive oil. So that soap is alkaline.
00:09:39
Speaker
If animal lard were used, it was heated and kept lukewarm. Lard needed to be rendered and strained before being used with ashes as seen in the documentary film, Fight Club.
00:09:55
Speaker
I knew you were going to do that. I made it ten minutes. Traditionally, olive oil was used instead of animal lard throughout the Levant, which this isn't a great sentence. No, I didn't notice that. I didn't write that sentence.
00:10:12
Speaker
The Levant was boiled in the copper cauldron. Oh boy. Throughout the Levant, it was often the case that olive oil was used instead of animal lard, and the olive oil was boiled in a copper cauldron for several days. As the boiling progresses, alkali ashes and smaller quantities of quicklime were added and constantly stirred.
00:10:34
Speaker
Once it began to thicken, the brew was poured into a mold and left to cool and harden for two weeks. After hardening, it was cut into smaller cakes. Aromatic herbs were often added to the rendered soap to impart their fragrance, such as yarrow leaves, lavender, and so forth. Sounds nice. I'm going to see if I can find the link to this, but I remember seeing a video
00:10:57
Speaker
online of, I think it was men in somewhere, I think it might have been Iran, but they were making soap basically on the entire floor of a room. So they like sort of poured it out and spread it and then like cut it into very precise cakes and it's very satisfying to watch. So I'll see if I
Bathing Rituals Across Cultures
00:11:17
Speaker
can find that video. It smells like that one aisle at Whole Foods. I like that aisle. I love that aisle. It's a great smell.
00:11:26
Speaker
Hello, welcome to Bougie Corner. OK. I was going to say Berkeley Bowl, but that's too niche. All of Berkeley Bowl smells like that. Go on. OK. We're going to continue with some text from a paper called A Natural History of Hygiene. Quote, if early humans kept themselves and their surroundings clean, did they also avoid diseased others?
00:11:56
Speaker
diseased others. That's my post-punk band. An ancient Mesopotamian text shows how an exorcist explained the sickness of a patient. Quote, he has come into contact with a woman of unclean hands or his hands have touched one of unclean body. End quote. So in that particular excerpt, it's not clear if the person is speaking of disease or if a woman of unclean hands refers to a sex worker. The authors of the paper mentioned both possibilities.
00:12:26
Speaker
So continuing from that paper, a Babylonian letter from the 17th century BCE counsels not sharing a chair, a bed, or a cup with a lady suffering from a disease. Certainly humans have continued to find rationales for what they felt to be right through to the present day. Sometimes the explanations were supernatural or religious, sometimes moral, sometimes naturalistic or scientific. Purification rituals are a common feature of religions.
00:12:53
Speaker
In Mesopotamian times, kippuru was purification through the application and wiping off of a flower paste. Flower as in ground grain, not as in, you know, flowers. It came to mean purification in general, as in the Hebrew word kippur, which I didn't know. That's exciting. Like yom kippur. Yeah. So it has to do with purification. Yep. Wow. It's from, yeah, it's from Akkadian.
00:13:20
Speaker
Wow. Wow. The laws of Manu, part of the four sacred Vedas of Hindu scripture circa 200 BCE, prescribed the avoidance of the 12 impurities of the body. So those include oily exudations, semen, blood, urine, feces, the mucus of the nose, earwax, phlegm, tears, the room of the eyes, and sweat, et cetera. Yeah. I definitely have been experiencing a lot of ram of the eyes lately. Oh, that's separate. It's allergy season. Yeah. OK. Yeah. Yeah.
00:13:50
Speaker
Christian morality became inextricably linked with hygiene, but not until after the Middle Ages, really. What was clean and pure was what was morally right. Wash me clean of my guilt, purify me from my sin is something that comes from Psalm 51. What is that, line 2? I don't know. Psalm 51, 2. Psalm 51, verse 2. Verse 2, right.
00:14:15
Speaker
the Qur'an agrees, quote, God loves those that turn to him in repentance and strive to keep themselves clean, which, and the citation for that is 223. I mean, this is all like,
00:14:27
Speaker
Okay, you tell me if there's something that comes up in Judaism and then you're like, also in Christianity, see the Old Testament. Yeah, of course. These all intersect. Okay. It's just nice to be like, yep, everybody's saying it.
00:14:47
Speaker
Yep. Greek history relates both supernatural and naturalistic rationales for hygienic behavior. The word miasma originally meant stain or sins that offended the gods, but came to be used as a term for the foul airs and atmospheres that caused disease. It was the Greeks, however, who coined the word hygiene. So that was, again, the goddess Hygaea. Granddaughter of Apollo, daughter of Asclepius. I mean, that's a bit of a, okay.
00:15:17
Speaker
and she supposedly headed a local healing cult which spread across the Hellenic world following the plagues of 429 BCE and 427 BCE, not great years. Hippocrates, 460 BCE to 377 BCE, exhorted that to stay healthy, one needed order and balance in all things, and above all, to stay away from the airs, waters, and places that contained the dangerous miasmas that were responsible
00:15:43
Speaker
for disease. The miasma idea hopped from the Greeks via Galen and the monasteries to medieval science. But before we get medieval, we should probably mention the Romans. Oh yeah. Those Romans loved them some baths. Love baths. We've mentioned this before, but it was back in our episode of curses. So we were more talking about the curses unless the bathing. Not as much about the bathing. Okay. Such
00:16:12
Speaker
was the importance of baths to Romans that a catalog of buildings in Rome from 354 CE, documented 952 baths of varying sizes in the city. I imagine these are public baths and not like individual people's bathtubs, right? It's like, excuse me, ma'am, can I come in and survey your bath? The bath censuses again. Oh God. Every year. Yeah.
00:16:39
Speaker
although wealthy Romans might set up a bath in their townhouses or out in their country villas, heating a series of rooms or even a separate building especially for this purpose.
00:16:51
Speaker
Didn't read that like a human. Although wealthy Romans might set up a bath in their townhouses or in their country villas, heating a series of rooms or even a separate building, especially for this purpose, and soldiers might have a bathhouse provided at their fort, case in point, at Hadrian's Wall, they still often frequented the numerous public bathhouses in the cities and towns throughout the empire.
00:17:17
Speaker
So Roman baths vary from simple to exceedingly elaborate structures, and they varied in size, arrangement, and decoration. Most contain... Most contained an apoditarium, which was basically a locker room, which I will now refer to be a locker room at any gym I attend as the apoditarium.
00:17:43
Speaker
I left my water bottle in the Apotateria. And this is just inside the entrance where the bather stored his clothes. Were her clothes? Or is there or neither or both? Whatever.
00:17:57
Speaker
Next, bathers progressed into the tepidarium, which is the worm pool. Then into the caldarium, which is the hot pool, or the hot room for a steam. And then finally, into the frigidarium, cold room, with its tank of cold water. The caldarium, heated from underneath the hollow floor, contained cold water basins, which the bather could use for cooling.
00:18:26
Speaker
After taking the series of sweat and or immersion baths, the bather returned to the cooler tepidarium for a massage with oils and a final scraping with a metal implement called a stridule. That the internet keeps trying to sell me via Wish. Yeah. It's like, no, I use a washcloth. Thank you.
00:18:45
Speaker
Some baths also contain a laconium, a dry resting room, that's what I'm going to refer to my apartment as, the laconium, where the bather completed the process by resting and sweating.
00:19:01
Speaker
Those are my two chief activities. So a friend of the show, Paula, asked specifically about the hot-cold cycle. And I think this is maybe the first recorded instance of this practice, but now it's grown into something that folks interested in alternative medicine is supposed to dilate the veins.
00:19:23
Speaker
relax the muscles, and stimulate the flushing out of things from the lymph system through a cycle of alternating immersion in hot and cold baths. This might be helpful for athlete muscle recovery and to ease soreness, but there doesn't seem to be any other legitimate medical benefit. Then again, we're not medical doctors, so let's stick with the Romans here. So this is like when you have to do like an ice bath,
00:19:52
Speaker
No, well, that's so there are there are two things that I found like the things having to do with muscles, heat and cold genuinely seem to help with that because it will both of those things reduce inflammation. So if you have an athletic injury and you either ice it or heat it, whatever your doctor tells you to do, that seems to help. But there's also this school of thought that involves
00:20:15
Speaker
cycling through hot and cold immersion to like detox your system. And that's not, that's not a thing.
00:20:25
Speaker
Yeah. Cause that was the whole lymph. That was the whole lymph thing where it was like the hot water forces your lymph nodes to relax. And then when you shock them with cold water, they contract and, and it, I not, it's not a thing. And then what the lymph, like it's supposed to help sweat out your lymph. Yeah. Something like that. I don't know. Again, when you get like the jade rollers and you rub them on your face and that helps with that. Yep. Okay.
00:20:54
Speaker
Yep. We should open a spa. I mean, we could, we wouldn't be able to tout any legit medical benefits, but we could make people feel nice. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. All right. Roman themed. Yeah. Because wealthy Romans brought slaves to attend their bathing needs. That will not be a feature of our spa. Oh no, we don't want slaves. Nope. No, thank you. All right. Well,
00:21:24
Speaker
The bathhouse usually had three entrances, one for men, one for women, and one for slaves. Yep. Great. Solid walls or placement on opposite sides of the building usually separated the men's and women's sections. Roman bathhouses often contained a courtyard or a palestra in an open air garden used for exercise. I just imagine like awkward stretching. Probably. Like doing lunges.
00:21:52
Speaker
Like walking across doing lunges. Downward dog. Republican bathhouses. As in the Roman Republic, not the RNC. GOP bathhouses. No, Republican bathhouses often had separate bathing facilities for women and men because the Roman Republic was Supes conservative.
00:22:15
Speaker
Actually, no, they were like, it was like a more conservative. Yes. Yeah. So yeah. Once was an Augustus show. Yeah. Okay. I was like, but it was. Okay. This is a comment on the Roman Republic. The first sentence we see mixed bathing was common. Uh, and is a practice frequently referred to in Marshall and juvenile who were writers, um, as well in, as well as in plenty and quintillion
00:22:44
Speaker
To many Roman moralists, baths illustrated how far the Rome of their own day had fallen into decline and so became a negative image. Cato the Elder publicly attacked Scipio Africanus for his use of the bathhouses.
00:23:04
Speaker
Roman bathhouses offered amenities in addition to the bathing ritual. Within the bathhouse proper, there might be food and perfume selling booths, libraries, and reading rooms. Stages accommodated theatrical and musical performances. So naturally our spa will include all of these features. Yeah, just like a jam band for all the sweaty naked people.
00:23:29
Speaker
Cool. Adjacent Stadia provided spaces for exercise and athletic competitions. Inside the bathhouses proper, marble mosaics tiled the elegant floors. Are they trying to sell this to me? I mean, it's working.
00:23:44
Speaker
The stuccoed walls frequently sported frescoes of trees, birds, and other pastoral images. Sky blue paint, gold stars, and celestial emergé adorned interior domes. Statuary and fountains decorated the interior and exterior. Yeah, doesn't that sound nice? You know what else is nice? What else is nice? That folks support this podcast with ads. Ads.
00:24:13
Speaker
All right. So far, this has been admittedly very classics and Eurocentric. Uh, we can't help it. So, well, we can help it and we're going to help it. I've been talking more about those, those clean rocks. Clean those rocks. We're going to scoot over to some other parts of the world and check out what the history of bathing looks like there.
00:24:37
Speaker
We're going to start with Japan. So in Japan, bathing as a regular activity dates at least as far back as the sixth century CE with the introduction into the country of Buddhism and associated ritual purification. A traditional Japanese furrow bath was more like a modern day sauna or steam room. The body was cleansed mostly via heat and steam. At this time, bathers would often take a change of clothes wrapped in fabric, which is the origin of furoshiki,
00:25:04
Speaker
the traditional art of wrapping objects so they can be carried. Practice photo-shiki on your dog a lot. Oh, I do. Wrap her up, hide her in a bag. Yeah, get in the bag.
00:25:18
Speaker
This style of bathing was a great luxury at the time, a pursuit rather than a necessity. The warrior class and commoners alike would usually wash in a washtub or by using water from a pail. A furrow differs from a conventional western bathtub by being of deeper construction, typically in the region of 0.6 meters or 25 inches.
00:25:36
Speaker
The sides are generally square rather than being sloped. They generally have no overflow drainage. Traditional pot shaped cast iron furo were heated by a wood burning stove built in below them, which like my cartoon brain immediately puts up that image. You know, when Bugs Bunny is in Elmer Fudd's cauldron and he's like chopping carrots into that. It definitely sounds like you're stewing yourself. Yeah. Hmm.
00:26:03
Speaker
But you know, you can keep it at a low heat. It's not like you can control the heat. So it's like a human crock pot. Less of a human. Yeah, low and slow. Yeah. Yeah.
00:26:14
Speaker
So furo or yubune which specifically refers to the bath with water and not just the steam bath are usually left filled with water overnight and in some households the water is reused or recycled for washing clothes the next day. It was the custom for more than one member of the family to use the same bath water and therefore for the Japanese it was important to be completely clean before entering the bath. So the bath is less for cleaning the body and more for soaking and
00:26:42
Speaker
some aspects of purification, but not actually like your scrub-a-dubs. The water is hot, usually about 100 to 108 Fahrenheit, which is 38 to 42 degrees Celsius. Traditional Japanese baths can also occur at the onsen, a fac- nope, not a faculty.
00:26:59
Speaker
a facility built around natural hot springs, or the sento, the communal bathhouse. In the modern era, the bath continues to be a hugely important feature of the house and or lifestyle, as reported in this article about the system bath or unit bath from JapanTimes.co.
00:27:17
Speaker
Japanese people love their evening bath, but tubs in private residences are a relatively recent development. By 1963 only 60% of Japanese homes had them. But as workers became more affluent and construction of new dwellings continued apace, even renters started demanding their own bathtubs and toilets.
00:27:38
Speaker
The system bath, or unit bath, revolutionized the housing market, and as with expressways and some other modern conveniences, it was introduced to Japan by means of the 1964 Tokyo Olympics. The system bath incorporated a toilet, a sink, and a western-style bathtub into a single prefabricated unit that could be installed easily and quickly, and it became a famous feature of the Hotel Nuotani, which had to be finished before the start of the games.
00:28:05
Speaker
The Japan Housing Corporation adopted the system math for the tens of thousands of apartments it had planned for the country in the 1960s. These apartments, both for rent and for sale, were characterized by two new features, the dining kitchen area and the bathroom, which provided space for a Japanese bathtub. The toilet had its own compartment and the sink was installed in the dressing area.
00:28:27
Speaker
With western baths, water is heated remotely and then transferred to the bathtub. In Japan, the water is heated in the bathtub. This self-contained heating concept is known as oedaki and remains standard, even as houses and apartments started using central water heaters. The main idea is that the temperature of the water in the tub is maintained over the course of an evening so that every member of the family can take a hot bath in succession.
00:28:51
Speaker
And since users, again, wash the body outside the tub, the water stays cleaner longer and can be reheated on subsequent days. Thus, the Oedaki system helps to conserve energy and water. Wow. Yeah. This is the part at which, when writing this script, I was sitting in my very chilly apartment and going, I want a bath. This is the point in which I'm sitting in my very chilly apartment and thinking, I wish I had a bath. I'm sorry. I've got like one of those sad stall showers.
00:29:20
Speaker
Yeah. You could, I don't know, hot water puddle? Cuddle your dog? Get inside it? Oh, okay. No, I could puddle my dog. What are you doing? Where is she? Oh, hi. Well, there's another famous set of bathing and steaming traditions that we'd be remiss if we neglected. And that is the Scandinavian, in particular, the Finnish sauna.
00:29:52
Speaker
Yes. From the Atlantic. Little says Finland quite like a sauna. The word itself is Finnish and in the country of some five million people there are roughly two million saunas.
00:30:09
Speaker
Taking a sauna is a centuries-old tradition that started in the rural parts of the country as a way for farm workers to get a reprieve from the cold weather, and the practice gradually worked its way into urban areas. According to Finland's official sauna society, a Helsinki-based group, not to be confused with the diplomatic sauna society, whose purpose is to preserve and promote sauna culture locally,
00:30:32
Speaker
100% behind both of these groups. They say, at its most primitive, the sauna was probably a pit dug into a slope with a heap of heated stones in one corner. As recently as the turn of the 20th century, women in rural areas would give birth in a sauna. The room would also be used to prepare dead bodies for burial.
00:30:54
Speaker
I read that often the walls of saunas were coated with like charcoal ash and that's actually antimicrobial. So it's not so weird that you might, um, it might be better to give birth in a sauna. Um, so yeah. And, and maybe the heat would help kind of ease some of the muscle contractions and cramping. I don't know. Yeah. Woof. Oh gosh. There's some finish words coming up.
00:31:25
Speaker
Oh yeah. Sorry. I tried to, I tried to limit the amount of, um, I haven't done it in a really long time. Oh man. Oh, saunas get hot by a means of a stove that heats a basket of rocks ladling water onto the rocks with an instrument. The fins call a. Yeah. Or like Lily Kawa or something. I don't know. creates a wave of steam or Lily.
00:31:56
Speaker
It's typical for the temperature of a Finnish sauna to reach as high as 190 degrees Fahrenheit. That is very hot. And Finns evidently love it. It's been reported that 99% of them use a sauna at least once a week. They also tout the benefits of a good steaming. One recent study from a Finnish university found that men who use sauna seven or more times per week were less likely to die of heart disease than men who used a sauna once a week.
00:32:25
Speaker
That's pretty significant. I don't know the sample size or anything. I also feel like this could be an issue of correlation versus causation. Because if you're in a position to hop in one seven times a week or more, you might have some other things going for you. Yeah, I didn't look further into that study, but I linked to the article and probably trace it back. If you really want to snoop it out,
00:32:49
Speaker
Oh, here comes something dumb. This is not to say there's no such thing as overheating. At the 2010 World Sauna Championships, a competition hosted in Finland over who can sit the longest in extreme heat, a Russian contestant died after spending six minutes in a sauna heated to 230 degrees Fahrenheit. Yeah, so what actually happened, and not to make light of it, but they cooked a person.
00:33:19
Speaker
Yep. Yep. That's terrible. It's not great. Then again, it was a voluntary activity. So yeah, boy. Yikes. Yikes. Indeed. Um, Eurokekonen, a cold war era president of Finland was reputed to have used the sauna to soften up the Soviets, which feels like a statement in poor taste after we just read about a Russian person being cooked.
00:33:47
Speaker
Yeah, but this was before that. Legend has it that when Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev came to Finland for Kekunin's 60th birthday, the two stayed in the sauna until five o'clock in the morning. As Finland's then Secretary of State Perti Torstila recounted the tale at the 15th International Sauna Congress in 2010. Are you kidding me?
00:34:10
Speaker
I love this. At the end of the visit, a communique was issued in which the Soviet government expressed its preparedness to support Finland's desire to integrate and cooperate with the West. Yep. Sauna. The Finnish are serious about their saunas. There was that time that the Finnish built a sauna in the desert in 1987.
00:34:34
Speaker
No, no, keep going. It's so good. When Finnish troops were assigned to the United Nations Peacekeeping Force in the Sinai Desert, they built- In the Sinai Desert?
00:34:45
Speaker
The Sinai Desert, they built 35 huts to house saunas. Analay Halonen, a Finnish diplomat formerly stationed in Tel Aviv, said, the Israelis and the Egyptians looked at them and couldn't figure out what was in those strange huts. When the Finnish officer told them it was a sauna, they began laughing. In this heat... Which is a fairy. I can only hear that in, like, a Jewish intonation in my head, like, in this heat! What are you doing?
00:35:16
Speaker
Well, let's have some ads. Okay, it's time for a roundup. Here are a few warm and steamy bathing traditions from around the world. We're going to start with Turkey. For Turkish people, bathing is a semi-religious ritual in which purifying the body goes hand in hand with purifying the soul. Muhammad himself enthusiastically endorsed sweat baths around 600 CE
00:35:43
Speaker
and hammams are often a kind of annex to a mosque, featuring elaborate domes and ornate architectural elements that emphasize an atmosphere of sanctity and reflection. The centerpiece of the hammam is a hot stone slab where bathers loosen up and undergo a five-step purifying ritual, the warming of the body, an extremely vigorous massage, the scraping of skin and hair, soaping, and finally, relaxation. Have you ever, have you ever done a hammam?
00:36:12
Speaker
I don't like other people touching me. Ever been on that hot stone slab? I've been on a hot stone. It's real nice, but this was like out in nature in the summer. And I was in a river. Oh man, it is. Is it real hot? It's very hot. Yeah. It is very hot and very hard. I mean, those are two things that a hot stone is, so I don't know what to tell you.
00:36:42
Speaker
All right, moving on to Russia. What the sauna is to Finns, the banya is to Russians. Pushkin, the Russian writer and patriarch of Russian culture, described the banya as a Russian's, quote, second mother. OK. He goes to his second mother for rejuvenation, warmth, and a bath. She restores him to a state of glowing health.
00:37:01
Speaker
In Russia, sweating and health are virtually synonymous, and unlike the semi-religious purification of the hamam, or the stoic calm of Finnish saunas, Russian banyas are loud, boisterous, steamy affairs. Yes, the Russian's bath of choice is a steam bath, and they like it extremely hot. The steam is produced by pouring water over a massive heater filled with hot stones.
00:37:22
Speaker
Patrons disrobe and don felt hats dipped in cold water to protect them from the extreme heat. Once they've got a good sweat going, out come Veniki. Birch switches with leaves dipped in icy water, with which Russian men and women take turns beating each other to stimulate the sweat glands.
00:37:39
Speaker
The experience is capped off with a nice long shower and a shot or two of vodka before trudging out into the cold Moscow air. I should say that much of this kind of florid description comes from standardhotels.com, so it's very much sort of a travel writing sort of vibe. Okay, so now Korea.
00:38:00
Speaker
Korea's bathing culture bears a resemblance to Japan's, which some attribute to Japanese rule in the 20th century, while others point to an earlier migration from China through Korea to Japan. Where Japan's bathing rituals are notable for their austerity and emphasis on simplicity, Korea's bathhouses, mokgyoktiang, in their more traditional form,
00:38:22
Speaker
or Jim Jilbang in their modern incarnation are sprawling, casual, and social, allowing visitors to wander through steam rooms, saunas, herbal pools, charcoal, cold, quote, saunas, ice rooms, and jade rooms with breaks for eating and socializing. God, that sounds like a great day. It does sound like a great day. If I could do it by myself, though. Or with a robe.
00:38:45
Speaker
take a rope bathing areas are separated by gender and full nudity is the norm okay nope only one's only accompaniment into the baths is a quote lamb head a small hand towel used to wipe sweat from one's eyes it's totally normal for friends and even strangers to scrub each other's hard to reach places hence the old korean maxim you're not really friends with someone until you've bathed naked together in a jim jilbang
00:39:11
Speaker
Okay, I guess we're not friends. Perhaps the most iconic feature of Korea's bathing culture is sesjin, extremely vigorous exfoliating body scrubs administered by ajummas, middle-aged women who pummel, slap, scour, and cover bathers in hot towels, leaving skin glowing and soft.
00:39:28
Speaker
which really all sounds lovely, but a fixation on cleanliness in some cultures is also a major boon to the companies that sell us the various goop that we put on ourselves to feel clean. Amber, would you be surprised to know that the history of toiletries is one driven nearly entirely by consumerism and contrivance? Absolutely not. Yeah, no, I know, I figured. For example, let's talk about those teeth.
00:39:57
Speaker
Two first. It's good to brush and floss. Yeah. There are even studies that show that flossing can prevent heart disease. And it's something that I regularly have nightmares about. Oh, sorry. Yeah. But I got a water pick.
00:40:16
Speaker
Good. Went to a party last week and we all talked about water picks for a long time. This is your thirties. Yeah. Human mouths. Human mouths, kind of stinky, always been stinky. And don't worry, there are ancient breath freshening solutions to prove it.
00:40:34
Speaker
Ancient Egyptians fashioned toothpaste out of natron. So, salt. Mummify those gums. They made breast weenies, pellets of frankincense and myrrh. In the medieval Islamicate world, people chewed on the mouth freshening twigs of the Salvador Persica shrub. Did you ever chew on birch twigs?
00:41:00
Speaker
I did all the time. I love, I love birch. Yeah. It tastes so good. Yep. And it's good for, it's good for your teeth. It's good for those too first. Yeah. Um, the Chinese were the first to come up with the idea of brushing teeth in the way that you may be familiar with today.
Evolution of Oral Hygiene
00:41:17
Speaker
Um, although the hogs hair bristles they used in the 15th century CE were effective,
00:41:24
Speaker
The idea did not catch on elsewhere for several centuries. Talmudic scholars report that the Torah decried bad breath as a major disability. Great. Meaning that it could be grounds for a wife to seek divorce or could prevent priests from carrying out their duties.
00:41:45
Speaker
Yep. I don't want a stinky priest. No. Fortunately, the Talmud also suggests some remedies, including rinsing with a mouthwash of oil and water. So they were the ones that started the oil pulling thing. Let's not go there. I can't. Or the chewing of a mastic gum.
00:42:05
Speaker
which is the chewing of a chewing gum, made from tree resin. This resin, which has since been shown to have antibacterial properties, is still used as gum in Greece and Turkey today. I've never had mastic gum, have you? I don't know. Oh, okay. Not to your knowledge.
00:42:31
Speaker
I've seen it sold in Middle Eastern grocery shops and have been tempted, but maybe someday. Toothpicks made of bone, ivory, quills, wood, or various metals were popular around the world until the Victorian era when they were suddenly considered uncouth.
00:42:52
Speaker
In Europe and the U.S., tens of breath fresheners called cashew became a must-have item in the 1800s. The candies sucked or chewed to a disguise of stinking breath, according to one 1850 self-help book.
00:43:13
Speaker
were made from cardamom, ambergris, musk, essence of violet, essence of rose, licorice, or oil of cinnamon. Wow, a couple of those are real rough. But in the 1880s, a product called Listerine hit the market, and with it came the term halitosis.
00:43:36
Speaker
For decades after Listerine first hit the market in the 1880s, it was kind of a jack-of-all-trades product. Originally invented as a surgical antiseptic and named after the founding father of antiseptics, Dr. Joseph Lister, its uses were varied. They included foot cleaning, floor scrubbing, and gonorrhea treating. I'm thinking of Lysol.
00:44:00
Speaker
Yeah, no Lysol was the, um, the other one. Yeah. We talked about that in our dirt after dark episode. Yeah. No, Listerine was, uh, and it is still more or less the same formulation, uh, was originally a treatment for gonorrhea applied externally. Whoo.
00:44:18
Speaker
That sounds Bernie. Yeah. Um, advertisements for Listerine transformed halitosis from the Latin word for unpleasant breath from a bothersome personal imperfection to an embarrassing medical condition that urgently required treatment, treatment that conveniently the company wanted
Toiletries and Consumerism
00:44:41
Speaker
to sell.
00:44:41
Speaker
Ultimately, the Bad Breath campaign was so successful that marketing historians refer to it as the Halitosis Appeal, shorthand for using fear to sell product.
00:44:54
Speaker
Mm hmm. Sounds familiar. It does. And so that's where the the phrase always a bridesmaid never a bride really became popular. It's a really famous Listerine ad. And I'll try to find it so I can put it up on social media. But it's because she had bad breath. She had bad breath. Yeah. She never she could never find a man. So she was always the bridesmaid. Stinky bridesmaid.
00:45:23
Speaker
Yeah. It's nice that you kept getting invited to weddings. Yeah. Well, she had a great friend group. Yeah. So, oh boy. That's definitely a feature of marketing for toiletries today. The idea that any human smell is an unpleasant one that must be eliminated or masked or sprayed with cologne, deodorants, powders, washes, lotions.
00:45:48
Speaker
The number of products boggles the mind, but that's not surprising since people have been thinking about personal cleanliness and smells for a long, long time. The history of bathing and hygiene is a very, very long and fascinating one. To Paula, we hope we've given you an adequate sampling of the topic and thank you again so much for sponsoring this episode. This one was fun to research. Yeah.
00:46:10
Speaker
And thank you, thank you, as always listeners for listening and for your support and your reviews. We'll be back soon in your ears with even more fun, sponsored episodes, which you can find on the podcatcher of your choosing. Yes, you can. And you can find us on the social medias on Facebook or the dirt podcast on Twitter or at dirt podcast.
00:46:35
Speaker
on Instagram or at The Dirt Pod. And all of that lives together at thedirtpod.com. And if you want to support the show, you can do so at a number of attractively priced tiers at patreon.com slash The Dirt Podcast. Thanks, everybody. We love you. Goodbye. Go clean yourselves. Goodbye. Bye.
00:47:02
Speaker
This show is produced by the Archaeology Podcast Network, Chris Webster and Tristan Boyle, in Reno, Nevada at the Reno Collective. This has been a presentation of the Archaeology Podcast Network. Visit us on the web for show notes and other podcasts at www.archpodnet.com. Contact us at chris at archaeologypodcastnetwork.com.