Physical Layout and the Process of Production

A typical soap factory in Nablus during the Ottoman period was made up of three basic parts.^[1] The first part consisted of wells, located beneath the ground floor, in which olive oil was stored. The number of wells ranged from three to seven, and their capacity varied from five to thirty or more tons each.^[2] The largest well was called “the lake” (al-bahra); the smallest, “the adjacent one” (al-janibi, pronounced al-jnayb). The second part took up the entire ground floor, which had a high ceiling designed to absorb heat from the cooking process. In the back and along the sides of the ground floor were storage rooms for the other raw materials: qilw and lime (shid),^[3] as well as wood and crushed olive pits (jift).^[4] A small room in the front served as an office. The soap-cooking center was usually located in the large, open space in the middle of the ground floor. This section contained the furnace room (qamim), a large copper vat (qidra, or halla), the “adjacent” oil well, fermentation pits for the qilw/shid mixture, and a water tank. The furnace was located below the ground level and reached via a short set of stairs. On top of the furnace sat the copper vat which weighed about one ton.^[5] (These vats were expensive and often jointly owned, and/or owned separately from the soap factory itself). Next to the furnace room was the “adjacent” oil well, which held exactly one vat’s worth of olive oil (250 jars, or approximately five tons). The location and size of this well were designed to save measuring time and to conserve energy: by the time the first batch was cooked, the second would already be warm and ready to go. The third part of the soap factory, called al-mafrash, took up the entire second floor. There the cooked soap was spread, cut, dried, and packaged.

Soap production took place in stages, each lasting longer than the previous one. The first stage was preparation of qilw/shid mixture. The qilw was put into a stone urn or mortar (jurn) and pounded into a fine powder with a wooden pestle (mihbash). Meanwhile, the shid was spread in a shallow pit and soaked in water until it coagulated and dried. Then it was rolled and crushed into a fine powder. The two powders were then combined and put into a row of fermentation pits (ahwad, usually three to six in number) that were raised from the floor. Each pit was about 1 meter long, 70 centimeters wide, and 20 centimeters deep. Hot water was then released from a small spigot (mibzal) in the bottom of the copper vat (the oil remained on top) and poured on top of the mixture in the pits. As the water absorbed the chemical content of the mixture, it was allowed to drip slowly into an identical, albeit deeper, series of pits located below. This was repeated until the chemical content of the water reached a certain strength. That water was then added to the vat, so that the oil would absorb the chemicals, closing the cycle. This cycle was repeated dozens of times (an average of forty times) while the hot, liquid soap in the vat was stirred continuously with a long, oarlike piece of wood called the dukshab.

Controlling the soda content of the liquid soap as well as the speed of the coagulation process was the all-important task of the supervisor (ra‘is). Taken out too early, the soap would not dry well. Taken out too late, the soap would become very hard and difficult to cut. The critical decision of when to stop the cooking process was based largely on the sense of smell. A round, 60-centimeter-long wooden stick, called al-shammama, was dipped into the liquid soap and then sniffed. If the supervisor thought it was ready, he passed the stick to the soap-factory owner for consultation. In case of disagreement, an expert was called in to render an opinion.

The cooking process took about eight days. This is why the product was and still is referred to as the tabkha, which loosely translates as “a cooked batch.”^[6] Each tabkha consumed 250 jars of oil (5,128 kilograms).^[7] The large amount and expense of the oil involved often forced oil merchants to pool their resources in order to commission just one batch of soap. The other raw materials, usually provided by the soap-factory owner, amounted to approximately 7 qintars of qilw,^[8] 10 qintars of shid,^[9] and about 25 jars of water per tabkha.^[10]

When the liquid soap was ready, it was carried in wooden barrels up to the al-mafrash via a steep set of stairs. There the soap was poured on the large floor and was contained by planks of wood about 3–5 centimeters high. After the soap firmed up, the uneven top layer was shaved off with a scraper (mabshara) to smooth the surface. Then strings dusted with white powder were stretched across at regular intervals a few centimeters above the surface and plucked, so that the powder fell and formed lines on top of the soap. Following these lines, workers holding a long, wooden stick with a sharp metal piece attached at the bottom cut the soap into cubes, each called a falqa.^[11] Later, other workers put the factory’s mark on each cube of soap by stamping it with a metal seal attached to a wooden hammer. The soap was then stacked into tall, hollow structures, called tananir, which were shaped like inverted cones. A space was left between each cube of soap for ventilation. The al-mafrash usually had long, high windows to speed up the drying process, which, depending on type of soap and its destination, took anywhere from three months to a year. After it dried, the soap was put into sacks and loaded onto camels for shipment. Each tabkha netted anywhere from 20 to 22.5 qintars, or roughly six tons, of soap.^[12]