Our Research Methods

Our aim is to better understand how perfumery—the quest to extract, concentrate, compound and preserve the essences of plants—influenced natural philosophy, medicine, and material and literary culture in the ancient Mediterranean world.

We are focusing on the period between the time of the conquest of Alexander the Great to death of the last Ptolemaic ruler, Cleopatra VII (332–30 BCE). We have chosen this period because its sources are witnesses to the encounter between ancient Egyptian- and Greek-speaking artists, craftspeople, philosophers and doctors during a time of great exchange and appropriation of technology and ideas related to perfumery, science, art and culture.

the Problems WE Study And Methods We Use

Despite the abundance and the quality of scholarship on the subject, we are still like students without teachers. The practices of ancient perfumery are obscured by the cryptic formulation of many of the recipes, the difficulties with botanical and other identifications, and the ephemeral nature of archaeological evidence left behind. We believe that we can understand more about those practices if we learn how to perform them: to replicate the phenomena—the materials, apparatus and methods—that led ancient authors to write what they did. The core of the project, therefore, is replication.

Our primary sources for the practices of ancient perfumery in this period are recipes. These are preserved in medical, documentary, literary and religious texts and inscriptions, which as texts have been studied, described and published by Egyptologists, archaeologists, philologists and historians. The recipes themselves, however, mean more than just the words they record. They are Gebrauchstexte, texts whose meaning is doing what they say. To know what a recipe means, for a perfume or for anything else, is to be able to perform it successfully. As historians of philosophy and science, our aim is not to become perfumers, nor do we need to recreate with great historical accuracy the apparatus used in antiquity to begin. It is enough to start from the recipes preserved on temple walls and medical texts and follow their process, and from this experience begin to understand the materiality and chemistry that informed them.

Combining Skills

The project is a collaboration between humanists and scientists. The team includes historians of science, Egyptologist, organic chemists, botanists and archaeometrists, who combine their skills in order to design experiments exploring the practice of ancient perfume making.

We work closely with Dr Ullrich Jahn and the Chemistry of Natural Products Group at the Czech Academy’s Institute for Organic Chemistry and Biochemistry (IOCB), where we conduct our experiments. Doing so, we bring before our eyes and under our noses the processes and products that led ancient perfumers to write the recipes and texts that they did.