Arab perfumes |
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Arab Perfumes The Arabs have been associated with perfume since the dawn of history. Frankincense and myrrh were collected by the Egyptians from the Land of Punt, which may have included south Arabia, from at least as early as 1500 BC, and Herodotus recorded in about 450 BC that Arabia was 'the only place that produces frankincense, myrrh, cassia, cinnamon and the gum called ladanon', observing also that the Arabs sent several tons of frankincense every year to the Persian emperor Darius as a tribute. Theophrastus, too, noted these materials as coming from Arabia, and Pliny provided a detailed account of the very substantial Roman trade in aromatics from south Arabia, which were taken either overland to Petra or by sea, together with spices from India, through Egyptian Red Sea ports. Arabia also produced other perfume materials such as balsam of Makkah. Calamus and costus were used in early south Arabian incenses and may have been locally grown. Pliny commented that the Arabs liked to burn the wood of 'storax brought in from Svria'. But the cinnamon and cassia of the early accounts do not appear to have been the same materials as we know by those names today- After the collapse of the Roman Empire the Arabian trade in frankincense and myrrh continued on a reduced scale. At the same time Arab perfume makers, especially those in Aden, began to make their name (it is recorded that Indian merchants even sent their ingredients to Aden to be made up into perfumes). With the advent of Islam in the 7th century AD, and subsequent wide-scale Arab conquests, came the Golden Age of Arab civilization, particularly under the Abbasid Caliphs of Baghdad (8th to 10th centuries AD), the period remembered in the Arabian Nights Talcs. The Caliphs controlled Persia, where perfume-making was already an art, and their ships, trading directly with India, the East Indies and China, began to bring back new perfume materials. Sophisticated techniques of distillation were devised by the Arabs of this time, enabling attars, particularly of rose, to be manufactured on a large scale. The Persians sent 30000 bottles of rosewater to Baghdad as a tribute every year. With the Caliphs encouraging the lavish use of perfume in their courts, Baghdad became the centre of a substantial perfume industry, and Arab perfume makers set up their shops in all parts of the Arab Empire. From Islamic Spain and Sicily, and in the luggage of returning crusaders, Arab perfumes crossed the borders into the Christian world. As Shakespeare testified, the 'perfumes of Arabia' were unexcelled in Europe until the 16ih century. Much of our knowledge of early Arab perfumes derives from a book of perfume recipes compiled by al-Kindi (c, 850 AD). From this it is evident that most of the principal ingredients of Egyptian, Greek and Roman perfumes were used by the Arabs, together with many materials previously unknown in Europe, notably the animal perfumes, ambergris, castoreum, musk and, a- little later, civet, and Far Eastern plant products such as aloewood and camphor. Fruits, like apple, apricot, mahaleb cherry, citron, myrtle, peach and quince, were used. Floral ingredients included hollyhock, hyacinth, jasmine, jonquil, lily, narcissus, pandanus, rose, violet and wallflower. But the Arabs also had a strong liking for the fragrance of herbs and spices and employed a wide range of them. Among the more extraordinary fragrant materials used were sweet hoof, pissasphalt and hyraceum. Oils employed as a base included bitter almond, ben, cotton, olive and sesame. Most perfumes were colored for good appearance, and for this the dyes included alkanet, emblic, dragon's blood and safflower. Several standard compound perfumes were produced widely, including Ghaliya, Khaluq (a recipe quoted under this heading show the complexity of some of the Arab perfumes), Ramik, Sukk and Naddah (a particularly luxurious incense). Some notion of the extravagant manner in which wealthy medieval Arabs used perfume is given in the 15th century Arab book of erotica The Perfumed Garden, where the advice to a man preparing for a (successful) seduction reads: 'Fill the tent with a variety of different perfumes: ambergris, musk and all sorts of scents, such as rose, orange flowers, jonquils, jasmine, hyacinth, carnation and other plants. This done, have placed there several gold censers filled with green aloes, ambergris, naddah and such like'.
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