Greece: From Palace Tablets to a Perfumery Archaeologists Mistook for an Inn

In Larsa, scent was an entry in an inventory; in Egypt, it was theology. In Greece it became something third: a commodity you pick up on your way home from the market. Over roughly a thousand years, scented oil travelled from Mycenaean palaces, where officials logged it on clay tablets as carefully as grain, to the shops around the Athenian agora, where citizens sat at the perfumer's the way we sit in cafés today — and finally to the island of Delos, where it became nearly an industry, with its own presses, furnaces, and merchants from half the Mediterranean. In this instalment we follow that road from palace workshops, through the only surviving Greek treatise on scents, to excavations of the 1990s that showed for the first time what such a workshop actually looked like. Along the way we meet a paradox: the Greeks wrote about perfumery, traded in it heavily, and wore scent at every turn — yet the one workshop we can reliably identify today turned up only on Delos, and archaeologists at first took it for an inn.

But the road doesn't begin in Athens. Several hundred Linear B tablets from Knossos on Crete record deliveries of oil that perfumers were to process; the texts call them a-re-pa-zo-o or ku-pi-ri-jo, literally "the Cypriot"; tablets from Mycenae, Thebes, and Pylos mention perfumers too. The most detailed records come from Pylos, a palace in the southwest of the Peloponnese destroyed by fire toward the end of the 13th century BCE; the perfumers' workshops probably stood right in front of the palace's eastern entrance, where archaeologists found cauldrons, basins, and vessels. Tablets from Knossos, Haghia Triada, and Mycenae attest sesame, safflower, and above all olive oil. The oil was treated with astringent additives (coriander, sedge, juniper) and then heated with flower petals, most often roses, or with rhizomes, such as those of iris. This is how the forerunner of today's perfume oils on an oil base came about — only without synthetic ingredients and without the distilled alcohol they didn't yet know how to produce.

The Treatise That Remained One of a Kind

What we know today about Greek perfume theory comes in large part from a single text: Theophrastus's On Odours (Peri osmōn), written toward the end of the 4th century BCE. Theophrastus — Aristotle's successor at the Lyceum, who lived roughly 371–287 BCE — devotes paragraphs 14 through 16 to the various oils used as carriers of scent. The most prized, he says, was balanos oil, pressed from the fruit of shrubs growing in the Syrian and Egyptian deserts — the least viscous and the most "receptive" to scent. The most common, though, was ordinary olive oil, specifically from unripe green olives (omphakion). Before the oil could take on scent, something astringent had to be added to it — aloe, broom, or sedge — and then it was heated with flower petals so that their aromatic compounds passed into the oil. The recipe for rose perfume reads, in Arthur Hort's English translation: they "put in ginger-grass, aspalathos and sweet-flag; and these are steeped as in the case of kypros." A large quantity of salt was also added to rose perfume. Brun reads this as protection against rancidity, as Dioscorides likewise advises.

The text, however, survives in poor condition — the two main manuscripts, Vaticanus A and Parisiensis Q, require philological reconstruction, carried out in the modern critical edition by Ulrich Eigler and Georg Wöhrle (1993). And although the Greeks had used scented oils since the age of the Mycenaean palaces, direct archaeological evidence of a workshop from the Archaic or Classical period practically does not exist. It took the Hellenistic period — and one particular place — to fill that gap.

A Shop You Could Drop Into Like a Café

In classical Athens, perfume shops were social hubs — Demosthenes and Lysias both describe citizens dropping in to sit around, much as they would at the barber's or the cobbler's, above all in the shops nearest the marketplace. It was no cheap pastime: according to Athenaeus (15.691), a quarter of a liter of perfume cost between five and ten minae — a sum equal to more than 500 days of an average labourer's wages. In the Clouds, Aristophanes has the farmer Strepsiades lament his wife from a city family: he, he says, reeked of wine-lees, dried figs, and sheep's wool; she smelled of perfume and saffron, passionate kisses, and extravagance. The countryman's abundance, then, could be smelled in wine, figs, and wool; the city woman's was fragrant with costly perfumes — and, as we saw above, those cost a great deal of money.

How one might come by such a shop is shown by a lawsuit. In the speech Against Aeschines the Socratic, attributed to Lysias and preserved in fragments in Athenaeus, Aeschines, a pupil of Socrates, is accused of going into debt to all and sundry while setting up a perfumery, and of getting hold of the perfumer Hermaeus's property by seducing his seventy-year-old wife. She, it is said, brought her husband and sons to ruin, and Aeschines "rose" from street peddler to dealer in perfumes. This is a hostile courtroom speech, not an impartial record, but it shows that a perfumery was a shop worth fighting over.

Delos: The Inn That Was Really a Perfumery

Delos, the sacred island dedicated to Apollo, experienced rapid economic growth from 166 BCE, when the Roman Senate placed it under Athenian administration and granted it free-port status. It attracted a cosmopolitan mix of merchants, mainly Italian and Oriental, until Mithridates sacked it in 88 BCE and the pirates of Athenodorus captured it in 69 BCE. Archaeologists on the island found a surprisingly large number of pressing stones — more than, by earlier estimates, would fit the land that could be planted with olive trees there. The French archaeologist Jean-Pierre Brun, together with his colleague Michèle Brunet, investigated the two best-preserved oil-pressing installations in the town in April and May 1997 (results published in the American Journal of Archaeology, 2000). The first, in the theatre quarter, turned out to be an ordinary olive-oil mill for table oil: two lever presses and a store for roughly 4,000 liters of oil. The second, in the stadium quarter, looked different: two vertical wedge presses and four furnaces built in a row. For a long time it was taken for an inn, precisely because of those furnaces. Brun, however, concluded that it was more likely a perfumery: the wedge press is, in the words of Hero of Alexandria in the 1st century CE, one that "perfumers use for some of their preparations," and the furnaces were suited to heating oil with aromatic materials.

According to Brun, these are the remains of a large perfumery and tangible evidence of the fame Pliny the Elder writes about: "in ancient times the most highly praised perfume came from the island of Delos" (Natural History 13.4), before Egyptian Mendes took it over. The pressing beds from Delos are, moreover, nearly all finely carved from marble, and at least six of them bear a heart in shallow relief behind the spout, carved by the same craftsman. Presses worked this carefully are found nowhere else but on Delos and at Paestum in Italy. Brun sees in this something like a trademark, much like the apothecary's mortar or the later printing press. The presence of Oriental merchants on Delos — Nabataeans, Sabaeans, Samaritans with ties to the Babylonian Jewish community — is, in his view, most likely connected to the trade in aromatics (frankincense, myrrh, and Eastern spices), in which they acted as middlemen. Delos was therefore not merely a place of local production.

Aryballos, Lekythos, Alabastron

Scent was stored and sold in vessels whose shape reveals what they were for. The aryballos — a small, round flask with a narrow neck — was carried by athletes on a cord at the wrist. It held scented oil, which they rubbed on before exercise or wrestling and which was scraped off afterwards, along with sweat and dust, with a metal strigil. According to Pliny, the oil used in gymnasia was scented with marjoram (Natural History 15.29). The lekythos, attested archaeologically from around 700 BCE and especially popular in the 5th century BCE, served for scented oils both in everyday use and in funerary ritual — oil was offered to the dead or to the gods of the underworld. The alabastron, a slender vessel, was originally carved from alabaster, and Pliny advises keeping perfume in it, in shade and cool. Later it was imitated in pottery and in glass. The famous Corinthian flasks were pottery too: Corinth specialized in scented oils in flasks decorated with animals and flowers, which in the 7th and 6th centuries BCE turned up in settlements and graves all across the western Mediterranean. That makes them one of the best pieces of evidence for the reach of the Greek scent trade as early as the Archaic period.

What Remains Uncertain

Not everything claimed about Greek perfumery holds up. The site of Pyrgos-Mavroraki in Cyprus, sometimes presented as a Bronze Age workshop with distillation equipment, rests only on the claims of its own excavation team; without independent peer-reviewed confirmation it cannot be treated as reliable evidence. Similar caution is called for with claims about exact classical-period recipes: the texts are, in Brun's words, "imprecise, particularly in terms of instruments, processes, and quantities" — and an earlier peer-reviewed study of the chemical analysis of Corinthian vessels (Biers, Gerhardt, and Braniff, 1994) does exist, but its precise results could not be independently verified in full. Greek perfumery remains, even after Brun's excavations, a field where archaeology has caught up with the texts in only one spot on the map.

Series on ancient perfumery: part 0 — Tappūtī, the first recorded perfumer · part 1 — Mesopotamia: trade in ancient Larsa · part 2 — Egypt: kyphi and the expedition to Punt

---

Sources

• Jean-Pierre Brun, The Production of Perfumes in Antiquity: The Cases of Delos and Paestum, American Journal of Archaeology 104.2 (2000), 277–308 — excavations of the pressing workshops on Delos and at Paestum, the most comprehensive archaeological study on the subject.
• Theophrastus, On Odours (De odoribus), English translation by Arthur Hort, Loeb Classical Library, 1926. Critical edition: Ulrich Eigler and Georg Wöhrle, Teubner, 1993.
• Theophrastus, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy — dating and biography.
• Pliny the Elder, Natural History, book 13 — on scented oils and the fame of Delos.
• Athenaeus, Deipnosophistae, book 13 — fragments of Lysias's speech against Aeschines.
• Aristophanes, Clouds, translated by Ian Johnston — Strepsiades and his wife.