Much depends on the culture in question. Western Europeans were not avid bathers following the fall of Rome. The Catholic church thought frequent bathing immodest and vain and so discouraged it.
Before that, however, things were quite different. The Romans were big on bathing and today you can go throughout Europe and see the ruins of public baths all throughout the former empire including, of course, the city of Bath itself which still has functioning Roman baths. Romans of all classes would go to the baths to bathe daily but also to socialize. Building baths was one of the best ways for emperors to get in good with the local populations and so many were very elaborate places with hot and cold running water, central heating, shops, prostitutes, personal trainers, and masseurs. The sexes used to bathe separately but right around Nero that ceased and the sexes bathed together. The Romans had few inhibitions on sex or nudity compared to even the most liberal modern European countries.
The ancient Egyptians loved bathing as well but given the scarcity of water in many places, instead shaved their bodies and used oils. When you see representations of most Egyptians, those are wigs they're wearing. A person would be covered in oil and then would have the oil gently scraped off. This worked surprisingly well and, if you could afford high-quality perfumed oil, left you smelling quite pleasant for the day.
The Vikings and other Scandinavians used the sauna to bathe and that too worked well enough. Alternating between the heat of the sauna and then jumping into cold pools of water or snow caused the body to sweat prodigiously and essentially clean itself. That's not to say they were entirely clean as the story of how Harold Fairhair got his name illustrates, but compared to their southern neighbors, Vikings were pretty damn clean.
Elsewhere bathing was seen as essential. Japan and Iceland, gifted with many natural hot springs, developed rich bathing cultures that continue to this day. Other Asians and American aboriginals tend to have a less offensive body odor than Caucasians, but many still bathed when possible. Some used the Egyptian method of oiling, others used water whan possible, and some desert peoples used sand as a bathing medium and the mild abrasive qualities of sand works nearly as well as water. Islam, Judaism, and Hinduism has ritual bathing incorporated into their religious obligations and so too their followers managed to stay relatively clean compared to their European counterparts.
Naturally Oceanic and African peoples do not have the problem of enduring freezing cold water or risk freezing to death and coastal and islanders always had the sea nearby to provide plenty of bathing opportunities.
Nope, it's really only western Europe that rejected bathing for such a long time and one of the reasons why the plague caused such enormous casualties on the continent with some exceptions. The Greeks, never quite forgetting their classical past, continued to bathe as did the Magyars of Hungary who were also blessed with many hot springs, and so suffered fewer casualties to the plague. It was really only after the plague that people began bathing more frequently no matter what the church had to say about it and it is worth noting that bathing was never entirely discarded by the European upper classes who had servants and resources to provide them with the intense labor required to prepare baths. There were exceptions, including one notorious French king who boasted about bathing only once a year, though again, many of them used the alternate method of using expensive and rare perfumed oils so when they say they weren't bathing, it didn't mean they were entirely unclean.