Perfumery industry in ancient Egypt
 
The beginning is in Egypt, where Egypt played a major role in establishing the perfume industry. The drawings found on ancient Egyptian graves stated that perfume played a fundamental role in Egyptians’ lives. The Egyptians knew incense for three thousand years BC, as its use was limited to the kings, princes and priests of Egypt who released it in the temples and used it in their religious rituals.
 
The credit for the production of perfumes goes back to the ancient Egyptian culture, where the royal class, princes and priests were keen to perfume with rose drops, made by placing the leaves of flowers on papyrus and sprinkling them with a little water.
 
When Queen Hatshepsut ascended the throne of Egypt, she sent missions in search of incense and other valuable commodities so that incense would be firmly on the throne of religious rituals in temples and the palaces of rulers and the wealthy.
 
The Egyptians accepted essential oils and anointed their skins with them, as they gave them a pleasure as it helped them protect their bodies from the influence of the sun’s scorching rays. They also invented many scented creams and skin moisturizers, and they formed them into conical shapes and melted them to cover their hair and bodies.
 
Senior statesmen used perfumes extracted from olive oil, almond oil and Haglaj oil, while the common people made their perfumes from castor oil.
 
Since the Egyptians believed that the soul would ascend to the sky, they used perfumes during the mummification process, which took from 40 to 70 days to complete. They used ground myrrh, Chinese cinnamon and other perfumes in the mummification process.
And they placed gold-coated vessels and jars made of fine pottery and chalcedony filled with aromatic materials in the graves to keep the skins of their dead smooth as silk in the next house.
 
Some of the used oils were so strong that even three thousand and three hundred years after Tutankhamun’s death, it was possible to discover traces of perfume emanating from ointments in tightly sealed flasks when the tomb was opened.
 
Such vessels and flasks were also found in the tomb of Queen Hetepheres. The same is true with the Egyptian beauty, Nefertiti, who surrounded herself with perfume.
 
As for the perfume industry
 
The Egyptian man-made perfumes in two ways
 
First method
 
The cold age … where the flowers are placed with a little water in a piece of linen cloth with two ends held by two women, each rotating against the direction of the other lady. Tags when celebrations
 
The second method is placing the roses in a small clay pot and burning them to give a fragrant smell to the air. This type of perfume was part of the gods’ offerings or bid farewell to the deceased and was not for decorative purposes.
 
The manufacture of natural pharaonic perfumes continues with the same ancient methods, based mainly on the ageing of essential oils.
 
One of the most famous Egyptian perfumes is the lotus flower, the first pharaonic flower discovered more than 7500 years ago, where they were cultivated on the banks of the Nile River and next to the pyramids because they also used it in mummification and fragrance processes in temples, indicating that it is aged in the same environment cultivated in canopic pots whose material is similar to pyramid stones.
 
The flowers, roots, gum, or fragrant leaves of the plant were soaked in oil and then filtered, and from the soaked, they obtained the fragrant oil; in the papyrus papers dating back to about two thousand years BC, some writings proved that the Egyptian Pharaonic civilization used aromatic fats in the form of small cones that emit Including a fragrant smell smells in palaces, homes and streets.
 
Kings and emperors flocked to Egypt’s perfumes .. Pliny, Theophrastus and others in the ancient Roman era 332 BC to 640 AD praised Egyptian perfumes as the best and most expensive perfumes in the world. The Roman emperors preferred Egyptian perfumes without others, especially those made from them in the northeastern delta in the ancient city of Mendes.
 
In 1923 AD, an archaeologist found pots and flasks containing traces of aromatic oils, and Queen Cleopatra was the queen of Egypt who loved perfumes the most, so she loved her in palaces, clothes, bathing water, and even a riding car.
 
During archaeological excavations in the Pharaonic tombs, Archaeologists have found, specifically in the tomb of Queen Hetep, the guards of many flasks and vessels that contain traces of essential oils.
 
The floral fragrance was also used to sacrifice or bid farewell to the dead from the Pharaonic velvet layer by placing the flower’s leaves in pottery vessels and burning them. Its fragrant scent spread in the corners of the temple the palace.
 
Perfumery in the Arabs flourished, and the oldest perfume they traded was called “rose perfume”, and they extracted it from lemon, violet and jasmine flowers. Still, they also used sandalwood, cedarwood, mint leaves, lavender, ginger root and iris, to extract multiple types of perfumes, according to the tribe that They belong to the perfume makers. Scientists Avicenna and al-Kindi are considered the most prominent perfume makers in the history of Arab civilization, as Ibn Sina discovered the method of distillation to extract perfume from roses. Al-kindi devoted a book to explain the method of making perfumes, and he used musk and amber in the various perfumes he produced.
 
Interest in the perfume industry began in France, during Queen “Catherine de Medici”, who asked her laboratory to manufacture perfumes to add new flavours to her perfumes. The results were good, but none of the components of the Queen’s perfumes was leaked, and it has been kept secret to this day.
 
What increased the prosperity of the perfumery industry in France was the great interest that its kings gave to this industry, for example, King Louis XV, who used to ask his servants to anoint his carriage and palace furniture every day with perfume, while his clothes remained in a vase full of perfume for days. He ordered the transfer of some. The farmer went to fields to grow fragrant flowers. Besides Louis the 15th, Napoleon Bonaparte was interested in making perfumes, and his cart was also painted with perfumes. He used 60 bottles of jasmine perfume per month, while the perfume was the most beloved to his heart, the “Josephine” perfume, which was among its ingredients Authentic Arabian musk.