#Soap does not occur naturally, but the process of creating it is so simple that its discovery probably occurred long before the first villages and towns came into being. There is a legend, repeated endlessly in soap making books- and websites, which tells of a certain hill in Rome called Mount Sapo. There was supposedly a temple on the top of this hill where animals were sacrificed in the fire, and the fats and ashes ran downhill into a river. Women doing their laundry discovered that their clothes became cleaner when they washed them at the foot of Mt. Sapo. It's an attractive story, but it probably never happened. No one knows anything about a hill called Mt. Sapo, by a river or anywhere else. Something like this may have occurred at some distant place and time, but even so it certainly does not mark the first discovery of soap. http://www.naturalhandcraftedsoap.com/soap-making.cfm