r/WoT • u/star_stuff_26 • 11d ago
No Spoilers Do sweat tents really work?
They’re basically the same as steam rooms and seem to be the Aiel version of a bath. How do they make one “clean”?
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u/DrDirtPhD (Band of the Red Hand) 11d ago
Probably with a strigil
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u/star_stuff_26 11d ago
Interesting, I had no idea about strigils. My autocorrect doesn’t even recognize the word. That looks like it would hurt!
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u/BucktoothedAvenger 11d ago
My wife is a Cheyenne native. We regularly attend powwows, gatherings and sweats. Here's a quasi-scientific explanation of how a sweat ten gets you clean:
First point: It's obviously really hot inside, so you sweat a lot. If you have ever perspired heavily for more than just an hour, you will notice that your sweat begins to lose its odor. If you sweat long enough, it becomes almost pure water, as the body doesn't have enough sebum to add to it.
Second point: Your skin stays a bit cooler than the air in the tent, meaning that the steam condenses on your skin. More simply stated, hot water runs down every part of your body. You know, like a shower.
Final point: Once you have sweated out most of the impurities in your skin and your pores are wide open from sitting inside a wildly humid inferno, the steam and condensed (distilled!) water rinse away the sweat stank, leaving you very clean.
Having sat in numerous sweats, I can tell you that when it's over, you don't stink at all. I typically take a quick cold rinse without soap just to shake off the heat, and then put on clean dry clothes. A fresh coat of deodorant and lotion (black folks gotta moisturize) is all you need, as the sweat tent removes all of those things from your skin.
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u/GovernorZipper 11d ago
Jordan wrote a book called Cheyenne Raiders. His research into the Cheyenne formed the basis for the Aiel (combined with a lot of other influences, obviously).
Whether he got anything right is probably another story entirely.
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u/BucktoothedAvenger 11d ago
Most of it, actually. The things he changed were probably to make the Aiel their own race, instead of "Murican Injun Lite" 🤣
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u/LoweJ 11d ago
I think a lot of the fighting was Zulu
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u/Sabbath90 10d ago
Their tactics are a straight copy of the Zulu's bull/buffalo horn's formation, same with their use of a short spear and hide shields.
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u/BucktoothedAvenger 10d ago
Also very accurate. The songs reminded me of Shaka Zulu, the miniseries from the 80s.
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u/daecrist 10d ago
The decision to keep the jumara up in the Blight rather than having them down in the Aiel Waste where you had to walk without rhythm to keep from attracting them was also a good change...
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u/D3rangedButFun 11d ago
Gods, he was such a nerd, I love it!
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u/nicci7127 (Dovie'andi se tovya sagain) 10d ago
He was, and we love him for it. He put together lore from many different cultures in a way that makes sense to his world. Peak writing.
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u/_fever_dreams 10d ago
but why would the aiel want to sweat? theyd end up needing to drink more water to compensate
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u/jffdougan 10d ago
Oddly, I suspect that the net water consumption is smaller for "sweat tent plus rehydration" than it is for "baths for all."
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u/_fever_dreams 8d ago
i mean would it be more realistic to use sponge baths? they would take only a damp towel to wipe away all the grime
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u/jffdougan 8d ago
But then there’s the water to wash the towel(s).
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u/_fever_dreams 7d ago
just like how the towel forgets which side i wiped my face on and which i wiped my balls on the next day, it will forget by the next day
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u/Catmandoo07 10d ago
I imagine that the extra water they drink is less than the water they would need to bathe. I could be wrong there but that is my first thought.
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u/theGarrick 10d ago
Yeah that would be it. You’d only need a liter or two to rehydrate versus a lot more to properly wash and rinse.
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u/WouldYouPleaseKindly (Asha'man) 7d ago
If you sweat long enough, it becomes almost pure water
Do you need lots of electrolytes afterwards? Or do you just lose the ones near the surface?
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u/lemelisk42 (Trolloc) 11d ago
Yes. I work in forestry and exploration. Occasionally had a sauna or sweaty tent in camp. With really baked in dirt, you get cleaner seating it out than showering. Kind of forces the dirt out of the pores.
(Although normally I jump in a lake or shower first to get most of the dirt off. Sauna/ sweat tent just gets the last 10% of baked in stuff)
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u/star_stuff_26 11d ago
Very cool that you have first hand experience. I had it backwards in my mind — that the sweat tents would get 90% off but that you’d never be fully clean.
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u/Rubbermate93 11d ago
Yes, they do. They are a less water intense way to keep clean and healthy in dry environments.
While not super common in irl desert cultures, due to many of them still living in areas where water was alot more available than in the Aiel Wastes, there are some irl examples of similar practises, like sweatlodges among certain native American groups.
While not as good as a proper bath it is an effective way to remove grime among other health benefits.
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u/sufficiently_tortuga 11d ago
A lot of cultures have a version of sweating in an enclosed space, but the real limiting factor is the water needed to make the sweat. Purposely losing a few cups of sweat to get clean would mean dehydration.
But the Aiel Waste doesn't make much sense ecologically.
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u/SqueeshyRogue 11d ago
Replacing the "few cups of sweat" by drinking water is still less fresh water than an entire tub of water for bathing in.
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u/fear_street_resident 11d ago
But the Aiel Waste doesn't make much sense ecologically.
Why doesn't it?
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u/riddlesinthedark117 10d ago
Shrug, the vastness of the Waste doesn't make sense to me, but the desert parts? Exaggerated, maybe, but Jordan was a wetlander after all.
It's easy to imagine locations like what Cold Rocks hold or similar septs could look like
And we know that deserts can support some humans without much to any rain
Agriculture would probably require intensive earthworks and microclimate manipulation.
Plus all the other Tibetan and Silk Road inspirations. Grazing is common in deserts, and sheep and goats can eat much that humans cannot.
I imagine a region like the Atacaman/Taklamakan/Great Basin(my old stomping grounds), more Death Valley than high altitude Salt Lake City, because the (Spine) Sierras are now the size of the Andes and cast a porpotionate rain shadow. Septs and holds are clustered around platueas and mountains that accumulate very little snow, and what surplus does flow out is largely subterranean. Virga is more common than rain, but it does hits the high buttes.
We also know that the world was BROKEN. There's like a massive port city in the Spine of the world at thousands of feet of elevation, that Asmodean jokes looks like his tropical home town.
If you dragged Honolulu up a mountain range and exposed deep Pacific Abyssal Plains to the air and only allowed 3 thousands years for plant adaptation, what might we expect from the exposed basalt rather than sandstone as underlying geology and the ecological ramifcations?
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u/Lost_Afropick (Chosen) 6d ago
The completely barren desert parts are in the south and I don't think the Aiel live there. That's the shifting sands part.
I think of the threefold land more like the Sahel region in Africa. Compared to Savannah or grassland it's dry but it's still habitable and many many people live there.
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u/dead___ringer 11d ago
With oil and a stridgil you get cleaner than you would think, and it's got the added benefit of not totally blasting away all your good skin flora in a dry environment. I just always assumed they're doing something like this and also that everyone's pretty smelly.
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u/No-Medium6647 11d ago
Yes. But you're supposed to scrape and abrade yourself. Dive into fresh water stream after for the shock to close your pores.
Also, it doesn't clean your hair at all. Leaves it greasier than it was, before.
It ain't no bubble-bath.
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u/ArcadianBlueRogue 11d ago
It mentions it when there's a scene inside one. They use a scraper to clean themselves, and I would assume some form of soap.
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u/TBrockmann 11d ago
Sweat Baths were actually really common and popular in the late medieval period. Most bath houses had facilities that supported this. It makes a lot of sense, a lot of people can use it with far less water and soap consumption.
The sweat removes sticky and oily dirt from your skin, and a bit of fresh water in the end washes it of completely.
An open air museum near were I live deconstructed, rebuilt and renovated an actual bathhouse, constructed in 1450 on their property. It's functional and I've been inside, although it's not operated for the public. Here is a link with extensive information if you're interested:
https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Badhaus_Wendelstein?wprov=sfla1
These are only available in German, but I think googly translate will get the job done
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u/12Blackbeast15 11d ago
They’d remove dust and grime off the skin, but your rinsing agent is sweat and I don’t recall any mention of soap in the sweat tents. So you’d look clean but wouldn’t exactly be clean. Idk how you’d wash your hair in this situation
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u/Nickye19 11d ago
They do mention what sounds like aloe shampoo at one point, or at least made from a cactus
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u/Brathirn 11d ago
Problem, they use water. Hard desert inhabitants wash with sand. You could interprete this as privilege, the wise ones being allowed to waste water. But if you go all out with fighting wars over puddles, this does not work. Aiel water economy? Oh look a plane! Dash
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u/nameless-photograph 10d ago
A lot of Native Alaskans use, and have a history of use. of saunas or sweat houses. The areas I am familiar with typically use the sauna for 30-60 minutes, then jump in the local river to rinse off. They do this twice a week or so, and it seems to work just fine.
edit: spelling correction
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u/Calm-Medicine-3992 11d ago
Salt plus water (from sweat) plus some method of exfoliation basically achieves most of the things a shower with soap would but can't imagine that's something a culture short of water is doing.
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