It is evident enough that these substances applied were different mordants which served to fix the dye upon the cloth; the nature of these mordants cannot be discovered, as nothing specific seems to have been known to Pliny. The modern mordants are solutions of alumina; of the oxide of tin, oxide of iron, oxide of lead, &c.: and doubtless these, or something equivalent to these, were the substances employed by the ancients. The purple dye required no mordant, it fixed itself to the cloth in consequence of the chemical affinity which existed between them. Whether indigo was used by the ancients as a dye does not appear, but there can be no doubt, at least, that its use was known to the Indians at a very remote period.
From these facts, few as they are, there can be little doubt that dyeing, and even calico-printing, had made considerable progress among the ancients; and this could not have taken place without a considerable knowledge of colouring matters, and of the mordants by which these colouring matters were fixed. These facts, however, were probably but imperfectly understood, and could not be the means of furnishing the ancients with any accurate chemical knowledge.
Soap, which constitutes so important and indispensable an article in the domestic economy of the moderns, was quite unknown to the ancient inhabitants of Asia, and even of Greece. No allusion to it occurs in the Old Testament. In Homer, we find Nausicaa, the daughter of the King of the Phæacians, using nothing but water to wash her nuptial garments:
They seek the cisterns where Phæacian dames Wash their fair garments in the limped streams; Where gathering into depth from falling rills, The lucid wave a spacious bason fills. The mules unharness’d range beside the main, Or crop the verdant herbage of the plain. Then emulous the royal robes they lave, And plunge the vestures in the cleansing wave. _Odyssey_, vi. 1. 99.
We find, in some of the comic poets, that the Greeks were in the habit of adding wood-ashes to water to make it a better detergent. Wood-ashes contain a certain portion of carbonate of potash, which of course would answer as a detergent; though, from its caustic qualities, it would be injurious to the hands of the washerwomen. There is no evidence that carbonate of soda, the _nitrum_ of the ancients, was ever used as a detergent; this is the more surprising, because we know from Pliny that it was employed in dyeing, and one cannot see how a solution of it could be employed by the dyers in their processes without discovering that it acted powerfully as a detergent.