Zahlavi

Perfumes in the days of Cleopatra. He wants to be able to re-create them

23. 11. 2021

Sean Coughlin from the Institute of Philosophy of the Czech Republic wants to experimentally reconstruct the process of preparing several ancient Greco-Egyptian perfumes. He is working with a team of historians, Egyptologists, philologists and organic chemists on a project called Alchemies of Scent. Together, they explore how people in ancient times extracted, combined, and preserved the scents of plants. Each year for the next five years, they will experimentally revive one of the scents used in antiquity.

"The art of ancient Egyptian and Greek perfumery has mostly not survived. We know roughly what scents these perfumes contained—scents like myrrh, cinnamon, cardamom, and terebinth—but we know far less about how they were made or why they were made exactly as they were," says Sean Coughlin. Studying these ancient perfume-making methods requires knowledge of modern chemistry and ancient records. “One of the main sources for perfume recipes are ancient Greek medical texts, especially pharmacological ones,” the researcher explains. “Perfumes were often considered more like medicines and were used as a form of aromatherapy. They were made mostly by the same merchants who made the medicines."

 

Perfumery as the ancestor of modern chemistry. In the beginning, there was a woman.

The earliest recorded chemical procedure was found on a clay tablet written around 1200 BC in Babylonia. It describes a process for making perfume. Its author, a woman named Tapputi, is in fact the first documented chemist in human history. At the same time, perfumery involved a range of expertise besides chemistry: biology and botany, and also psychology and natural philosophy. Perfumery, like alchemy, was an art of transmutation, where oil or fat was meant to change and take on the essence and scent of something else. These scents were used not only to cleanse the body and perfume clothes or hair but also to cure disease and perform magic rituals. They were also economically important. Egyptian perfumes became incredibly popular in ancient Greece and Rome. Indeed, in the Roman Empire, many books of cosmetic recipes for perfume and scented soaps were marketed with Cleopatra's name.

 

Sean Coughlin's team, in addition to the actual production processes, is also focusing on how people from Alexander the Great to Cleopatra VII (4th–1st century BC) understood these processes, how they passed them on, and how they influenced natural philosophy, medicine, as well as art and culture at large.

 

In addition to the ancient fragrances themselves, like Stakte, Mendesion, Metopion, Susinum or "smoke perfume," the project will also produce a dictionary of Egyptian, Greek and Latin perfumery, a recipe and procedural manual, and three monographs on perfume making in the context of the history of science and culture. Meanwhile, the possibility that you may acquire a perfume based on ancient recipes and practices in the future remains open by producing one at one of the project’s public perfume making workshops.

Download the press release here.

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