Perfume in Ancient Egypt

When the gods breathed the smoke of resins

More than four thousand years ago, in temples consecrated to Amun-Ra or Isis, a heavy, aromatic smoke rose towards the painted vaults. This was no mere ritual gesture: it reflected a profound conviction that the gods fed on scents, and that the smoke of resins was the language in which men addressed the divine. The Latin word per fumum, literally "through smoke", finds its very origin in these ancient Egyptian practices. Egypt did not merely use parfum: it conceptualised it, codified it and passed it on to every civilisation that followed.

The earliest written traces of fragranced preparations in Egypt date back to the Old Kingdom, around 2700 BCE, under the Fourth Dynasty of the pyramid-building pharaohs. Medical papyri, including the famous Ebers Papyrus discovered in Luxor in 1872, list hundreds of formulas combining plant and mineral substances for therapeutic, cosmetic and ritual purposes. The distinction we draw today between medicine, cosmetics and spirituality did not exist: the same preparation could heal a wound, please a god and seduce a lover.

Kyphi, the most sacred parfum of all

Among all the olfactory creations of ancient Egypt, kyphi holds a singular place. This complex preparation, burnt every evening in temples at sunset to accompany Ra's descent into the underworld, is the first parfum recipe humanity ever recorded in writing. The priests of Edfu, in their temple dedicated to Horus, carved two versions of its composition onto the walls of the offering hall, which can still be read today. Plutarch, the Greek philosopher of the first century CE, also passed down a description of it in his treatise Isis and Osiris, mentioning as many as sixteen ingredients: raisins, terebinth resin, sweet flag, camel grass, cyperus, pine nut, bitumen, myrrh, and other substances that translators still struggle to identify with certainty.

The preparation of kyphi followed a rigorous ceremonial. The texts specify that the ingredients had to be blended in silence, while sacred texts were read aloud, with certain phases of the moon considered more auspicious than others. This near-alchemical dimension of working with scents foreshadows the laboratories of Arab perfumers in the Middle Ages and, further still, the workshops of seventeenth-century European chemists. Kyphi was not merely an incense: Dioscorides, the Greek physician of the first century, attributed to it soothing and anxiety-relieving virtues, noting that it "softened sorrows and dissolved cares".

The incense routes and the economy of aromatics

Procuring the raw materials needed for rituals and bodily care was, for ancient Egypt, a matter of major political and economic importance. Myrrh and frankincense — the latter known in Egyptian as senetjer, "that which makes divine" — did not grow in the Nile Delta. They came from the land of Punt, a mysterious territory that Egyptologists now place approximately in Eritrea, Ethiopia or along the Somali coast. Queen Hatshepsut, who reigned in the fifteenth century BCE, sent a memorable expedition to this distant land, whose progress is still recounted in the reliefs carved on the walls of her funerary temple at Deir el-Bahari. The ships returned laden with incense trees transplanted with their root balls intact, myrrh in tear-shaped resin, ebony, gold and exotic animals. These trees were planted in the gardens of the temple of Amun at Karnak, the first documented attempt at cultivating aromatic plants for ritual purposes.

The trade in aromatics structured exchange networks that extended as far as Mesopotamia, Minoan Crete and, later, Greece. Jars containing terebinth resin residues, found in shipwrecks off the Turkish coast dating to around 1300 BCE, bear witness to the intensity of these Mediterranean exchanges. Egypt played a central role in this triangular trade, importing resins from Arabia and East Africa, transforming them into elaborate products, and redistributing them throughout the Mediterranean basin. Egyptian perfumers were thus, even then, alchemists of trade as much as of scent.

Techniques and recipes: the beginnings of perfumery

The Egyptians were not familiar with steam distillation, a process not mastered until the tenth century by Avicenna. They did, however, develop several remarkably effective extraction techniques. Hot enfleurage, or maceration, involved melting animal fats — lard, ben oil drawn from Moringa oleifera — and immersing flowers or resins in them for several hours, sometimes several days, until the fat was saturated with odour molecules. This fragranced fat, the unguent, was then applied to the body, wigs and ritual objects. Cones of solid unguent worn on the head by guests at banquets are depicted in numerous tomb paintings: as they melted under the warmth, they gradually released their aromas throughout the celebration.

Cold pressing onto fibrous supports — linen, cotton, wool soaked in oil — made it possible to extract the essences of more delicate flowers, including the blue lotus, the sacred flower par excellence, a symbol of rebirth and creation. Chemical analyses carried out on vessels found in the tomb of Tutankhamun, who died around 1323 BCE, revealed the presence of fragranced animal fats still partially active after more than three thousand years in the tomb — striking evidence of the quality of the preservation techniques mastered by Egyptian perfumers. Excavations at the Wadi Natrun site have also uncovered unguent production workshops, complete with jars, mortars and scales, the first "laboratories" in the history of perfumery.

From body to tomb: parfum as passage

In Egyptian cosmology, parfum was not a luxury reserved for the living. It accompanied the dead on their journey to the afterlife and played an active role in funerary rituals. Mummification itself was a profoundly olfactory operation: natron, myrrh, cedar resin, bitumen of Judea, cypress oil — substances chosen as much for their antiseptic properties as for their symbolic significance. Embalmers, who practised their art over seventy days, were also specialists in aromatics. The mummified body was then wrapped in bandages impregnated with fragranced resins, before being placed in a sarcophagus whose inner walls were coated with unguents. Scent was conceived as a vehicle of transformation, capable of hastening the deceased's metamorphosis into a being of light.

This funerary use of parfum endured across centuries and borders. The Greeks and Romans adopted and adapted Egyptian practices, notably the use of balms and resins in mortuary rites. The tradition of burning incense in places of worship, found in the synagogues of late antiquity, in the earliest Christian churches, in mosques and Buddhist temples, has its roots in those Egyptian temples where, every evening, the smoke of kyphi once rose. Four thousand years later, when a contemporary perfumer works with myrrh, styrax or labdanum, they are handling raw materials that the priests of Amun knew intimately. Ancient Egypt is not merely a chapter in the history of perfumery: it is its very foundation.