Welcome back for another episode of Vintage Egyptologist. Today
we're going to be talking about scents, perfumes, and incense in ancient Egypt.
And our sponsor today is none other than Penhaligon's, a company with a
storied history going back to 1870 and the holder of two royal warrants the first in 1903.
The reason why I want to begin with the concept of royal warrants is because of King Hatshepsut
who not only used incense as a way to legitimize her kingship,
but also dispatched an expedition to put to fetch incense frankincense
and myrrh and commemorated that as one of the signature achievements of her reign.
King Hatshepsut ruled between 1473 and 1458 bce. She was the daughter of a king Thutmose I
and a wife of another king Thutmose II. Upon the death of Thutmose II, Hatshepsute essentially
takes over as regent ruling while Thutmose III is a child However seven years into this arrangement
she actually declares herself king very possibly because she had a very important ritual role the
god's wife of Amun, and also could trace back her lineage to both the kings and the queens
of the late seventeenth dynasty Hatshepsut uses some interesting means to legitimize
her kingship including a fascinating cycle of reliefs at her temple on the west bank of Thebes
now called Deir el-Bahri. We call these scenes the divine birth cycle
these images and texts claim that the god al moon is actually Hatshepsut's father and this
goes back to the very beginnings of Egyptian kingship where the king was believed to be
the earthly incarnation at first the god Horus and soon after the sun god Ra by the time of the
middle kingdom the god Amun of Thebes who then becomes the imperial god of the New Kingdom is
closely associated with kingship but Hatshepsut's reign is the first time that we have these images
preserved in this way with these hieroglyphic annotations so how does Amun engendering the
future king Hatshepsut relate to perfume? in this scene we see Amun on the left his crown is mostly
damaged but we know from many many other examples of Amun that he would have been wearing a crown
with two tall ostrich plumes and on the right we see queen Ahmose who is Hatshepsut's mother
Ahmose and Amun's legs are crossed and he is giving the sign of life both to her nostrils and
into her palm these are subtle ways in which the Egyptians express intimacy the hieroglyphic text
is a bit more explicit quote words spoken by Amun-Ra lord of the thrones of the two lands
foremost of his private apartment after he made his transformation into the majesty of this her
husband Thutmose given life so that is how Amun Ra gains entry into the queen's bedroom
he transforms into the king into Thutmose the first the hieroglyphic text then continues
he Amun found her the queen as she was resting in the interior of the palace
she awakened because of the divine aroma and she smiled before his majesty
so what gives the god away what indicates to the queen that it is Amun and not her husband Thutmose
the first is how he smells after the actual divine conception occurs we read how quote
love of him coursed through all of her limbs and the palace was inundated with divine aroma
every one of his sense was from point and this topped him punt
is fascinating because that is the origin of so many of the materials that the ancient Egyptians
used to create their own sense it is difficult to pinpoint exactly the ancient location of point
however we know from Hatshepsut's reliefs that she dispatched a maritime expedition she had ships
built dismantled taken across the eastern desert probably on the Wadi Hammamat road reassembled
and launched south along the red sea and we have fabulous depictions of the sorts of fish that the
sailors encountered when the Egyptian expedition brought back from point unto you trees trees
that would produce the incense that would be burnt upon the altars of temples throughout Egypt
we know that by doing this was fulfilling the promises that she made to her divine father Amun
the ancient Egyptians had several different words for incense
the main word is sennetjer which literally means to make divine so the root nature meaning god
or netjer divine with a causative s prefix thus to make divine another word for incense
the Egyptians use is kapet and that root refers to smoke or burning and it's really interesting that
the ancient Egyptian word kapet thus has the same etymology of our word perfume which goes back to
Latin meaning through smoke because the easiest way to release a scent in antiquity was through
burning in addition to temple ritual burning incense for the gods the ancient Egyptians
also used scents during celebrations and this is where we get that concept of the perfume infused
wax cones that people would place on top of their wigs during giant festival celebrations
the tomb painting is a brilliant example of how ancient Egyptian art is full of scents we can see
the scented wax cones that both the man and his wife are wearing but we also see
floral collars beneath their chairs and another great indication of scent
are the lotus blossoms also decorating the women's wigs so when we see art like this it's
not just an indication of the visual richness of a festival celebration or hear a funerary
banquet but the images themselves are redolent with the sweet smells of the ancient Nile valley
when the ancient Egyptians made perfumes what they were actually creating were scented
ungents and oils because at that point in antiquity distillation had not been invented
meaning that you could not have alcohol-based perfumes as we have today and has certainly
existed by the middle ages but there's even an Egyptian connection here because it appears
that the process of distillation which required a certain type of glassware was actually created by
a female alchemist who lived in Alexandria in the first couple of centuries CE Maria of Alexandria
the alchemist thus set the stage for later developments of distillation and perfumes
that we can enjoy today such as the remarkable historical and trade routes collections
at Penhaligon's in future episodes we're going to dive deeper into the ancient Egyptian origins of
alchemy going beyond the work of maria of alexandria and Zozomos of Panopolis into how
metallurgists and miners of the pharaonic era
set the intellectual stage for the deep alchemical reflections that we see in later authors