No-one knows when or why ancient man first discovered the pleasures and benefits of bathing and soaking in hot water, but it is easy to imagine one of our far-off ancestors finding that a dip in one of the nearby hot spring pools was more fun than in a cold river or pool and then noticing how good he felt after.  Maybe aches and stiffness had been eased, maybe congested nose or throat had become cleared by the vapours, maybe many things.

What we do know is that bathing in hot water for washing, healing and social pleasures has been around for many centuries and in many cultures.

Most famously, the ancient Romans put a great deal of emphasis on bathing, turning the art of the soak into a ritual.  Bathing was a social event as well as a way to purify the body and relax.  Meeting at communal bath houses, they went through a series of rooms of alternating temperatures at a leisurely pace, dipping themselves in hot and cold baths.  The ancient Greeks - Homer, for example, describes mythological warriors bathing in warm water in order to regain strength and continue the fight - and Minoans, too, had strong bathing cultures.  Bathing was a well-developed, elaborate practice in ancient China by the beginning of the Chon dynasty - about 1000 B.C., and evidence shows the Japanese may have not been too far behind in the practise.

It seems that hot bathing may have developed from religious beliefs.  Many ancient cultures (e.g., Egyptian, Jewish, Mesopotamian and Hindu) - and many still today - believed that cleanliness was next to godliness and had elaborate bathing rituals before entering sacred places.  The ritual bathing by Hindus in the Ganges and the ablutions of the ancient Egyptians in the Nile in order to purity themselves and to pay tribute to the dead are well documented and are the forerunners of saunas, steam baths, and hot tub baths.

The earliest indications of baths used for the purpose of hygiene and leisure date back to the third millennium B.C. and can be divided into two categories: steam baths (mainly in Europe, Africa and Asia) and cold baths (Asia).  Communal baths were set up separately from the village quarters and used as means of keeping away evil spirits or paying tribute to the dead.  The oldest hot tub found so far dates back to 1700 B.C. and was in the palace of Knossos in Crete.  Its similarity to present-day bathtubs is startling, as is its system of plumbing.

In ancient Rome, the establishment of thermal baths represented an important advance in the social process as well as constituting a major source of health and relaxation.  The word thermae, which means 'warm', came from the Greek culture and represents the concept of the arena, yet the term was adopted by the Romans to signify the place where tribute was paid to the body by purifying it in baths that alternated between cold and hot.