The Perfumer's Shadow: Tappūtī-Bēlet-ekallim and the Earliest Origins of Perfume Science

The connection between perfumery and power runs deeper than one might expect. Both realms deal in the transformation of materials, attempting to elevate the mundane into the extraordinary. But for Tapputi, this connection was not metaphorical. As one of the earliest documented chemical practitioners in human history, her expertise in aromatic compounds granted her unprecedented access to the highest echelons of Assyrian society.

Perfume making dates back at least 3,000 years – to the time of Tapputi-belat-ekalle, who is considered the first recorded chemist in history. What we know about her comes from inscriptions on fragments of clay tablets dating back to the Middle Assyrian period (1400–1000 BC). As Roberta Angioi of Dublin City University explains: “The inscriptions tell us that Tapputi was in charge of ‘overseeing the palace’ as the leader of a collective of female expert perfume makers in Mesopotamia (present day Iraq and Iran). These muraqqītu, experts in aromatics, prepared fragrances for the king and his royal family.”

This phenomenon of the perfumer-administrator continues to influence our understanding of ancient power structures, raising important questions about sensory expertise, gender roles in early science, and the embodied knowledge of chemical practitioners. Yet Tapputi’s story resists simple categorization. It is neither a straightforward tale of female empowerment nor a coincidental historical footnote, but rather a complex interweaving of chemical innovation, royal patronage, and the preservation of knowledge across millennia.

A shaft of light cuts through the window of a Berlin museum archive, illuminating an ancient clay tablet as an archaeologist carefully examines its cuneiform markings. The camera pans to reveal fragments pieced together like a puzzle, their edges broken and worn by time. A voiceover intones: “Her hands knew things most scholars could only imagine—the secret transformations of materials that most ancient people experienced as divine intervention or magic.”

What we know of the first perfumer in the historical record comes from one tablet. It is written in Middle Assyrian and currently resides in the Vorderasiatisches Museum in Berlin. The tablet, KAR 220, is a scholarly concordance on perfumery and was housed alongside other chemical texts like tablets on glass-making in the ancient library of Aššur.

The tablet contains the line, “from the mouth of the muraqqītu Tappūtī-Bēlet-ekallim,” revealing both her professional title and her association with the palace. The scribe of KAR 220 conveniently dated his work. The tablet was made in the 5th year of the reign of King Tukultī-Ninurta I on the 20th of the month of Muhur-ilani, which corresponds to early May of the year 1239 BCE.

Her methods involved what modern chemistry would recognize as extraction, distillation, and filtration—the foundational techniques of both perfumery and laboratory science. Tapputi used flowers, oil, calamus, cyperus, myrrh, and balsam. She added water or other solvents, then distilled and filtered several times. This is also the oldest referenced still in historical records.

The laboratory of an ancient alchemist. Vessels of copper and clay arranged with methodical precision. A woman works deliberately, her movements suggesting both ritual significance and scientific exactitude. As she directs assistants in the filtering of an aromatic solution, a palace official waits impatiently nearby, a reminder of the royal demands that drive her innovations.

Tapputi’s professional designation as a muraqqītu (female preparer of aromatics) placed her within a specific institutional context. She did not work in isolation but headed a workshop within the palace complex, overseeing both production and apprenticeship. Her laboratory wasn’t a humble perfumer’s shop but a state-funded research and production center developing luxury goods for the elite.

The formula preserved in KAR 220 reveals a sophisticated understanding of chemical processes. It describes how she used flowers, oil, calamus, cyperus, myrrh, and balsam as base materials. She then employed water as a solvent and conducted multiple distillations and filtrations—evidence of systematic experimentation and refinement.

Martin Levey, a pioneering scholar of ancient chemical practices, documented in his studies of Babylonian chemistry that Tapputi’s processes represented the cutting edge of their time: “The fragrance depicted on the tablet is an aromatic salve created through steeping botanicals through a series of oil and water treatments. This infused the oil with scent and thickened the product. While these techniques are quite rudimentary compared to today’s sophisticated production methods, we do see the early forbears of both enfleurage and steam distillation in this work.”

Contrary to some modern interpretations, Tapputi did not use alcohol as a solvent—the distillation technology for concentrated ethanol wouldn’t be developed until over two millennia later—but her innovations in aqueous extraction techniques represented the cutting edge of chemical technology in her era.

The scene shifts to the royal library of Ashurbanipal. Ancient scribes carefully copy and catalog tablets, preserving knowledge across generations. Among the texts being transcribed is Tapputi’s formula, deemed valuable enough to be included in the king’s vast collection of wisdom. The scribe pauses before pressing the stylus into clay, momentarily considering the strange responsibility of preserving another’s knowledge centuries after their death.

How do we know about Tapputi at all? The preservation of her name and work resulted from the ancient Near Eastern tradition of knowledge curation—the deliberate copying and safekeeping of valuable information.

The tablet bearing Tapputi’s formula was not her original document but a scholarly concordance on perfumery created in the fifth year of King Tukultī-Ninurta I’s reign (approximately 1239 BCE). It was housed alongside other chemical texts such as glass-making formulas in the ancient library of Aššur. This implies that her work had already achieved canonical status, deemed worthy of inclusion in the educational corpus of Mesopotamian technical literature.

“The fact that Tappūtī-Bēlet-ekallim is named at all is significant,” notes a study of the tablet from the Death Scent archive. “We have documentation of the perfumery trade for hundreds of years before her lifetime. However, palace workers, even skilled workers like perfumers, were often not named in written records. This was especially true of perfumers that came to Aššur through conquest.”

The survival of Tapputi’s name while countless others were lost creates a paradox of historical representation. As one researcher poignantly observed: “The difference between being the mother of perfumery or a footnote in history is a crack in a clay tablet. This is the essence of survival bias. Tappūtī-Bēlet-ekallim is extraordinary because her name survived, which was totally by chance.”

A nineteenth-century museum archive. European archaeologists carefully unpack crates of antiquities shipped from Ottoman territories. Among the fragmentary tablets, a patient scholar notices a female name associated with a technical procedure. His brow furrows in confusion—this contradicts everything he has been taught about the history of science and the role of women in ancient society.

The rediscovery of Tapputi in the modern era represents more than the recovery of a single historical figure; it forces a fundamental reconsideration of the history of chemistry, women in science, and the transmission of technical knowledge.

When nineteenth-century Assyriologists first translated tablets containing references to Tapputi, they encountered a figure who disrupted their assumptions about both ancient gender roles and the origins of scientific practice. Here was concrete evidence of a woman practicing sophisticated chemical techniques nearly three millennia before the formalization of chemistry as a scientific discipline in Europe.

In their pioneering 1975 article “Women in Chemistry Before 1900” in the Journal of Chemical Education, Sherida Houlihan and John H. Wotiz helped introduce Tapputi to the modern scientific community, challenging long-held assumptions about the origins of the chemical sciences. Their work highlighted how Tapputi’s contributions had been obscured by historical biases that tended to exclude women and non-European practitioners from the scientific narrative.

This historical erasure wasn’t accidental but reflected the biases of early archaeological work in the region. As European powers competed for archaeological treasures from the ancient Near East, they framed their discoveries within narratives that emphasized connections to classical Greece or biblical accounts, often overlooking the indigenous scientific traditions of Mesopotamia.

A university lecture hall, present day. A chemistry professor projects images of ancient tablets alongside modern molecular diagrams. Students’ faces register surprise as they realize the continuity between Tapputi’s methods and contemporary laboratory techniques. The boundaries between modern science and ancient practice blur as the professor demonstrates the chemical principles behind Tapputi’s distillation process.

Today, Tapputi has emerged as a powerful symbol at the intersection of feminist history, STEM education, and cultural heritage studies. Her work provides concrete evidence of women’s historical contributions to chemistry and offers a tangible counter-narrative to the persistent myth that women’s exclusion from scientific fields was universal throughout history.

In their comprehensive work “Women in Chemistry: Their Changing Roles from Alchemical Times to the Mid-Twentieth Century” (Chemical Heritage Foundation, 2005), Marelene and Geoffrey Rayner-Canham place Tapputi at the beginning of a long but often hidden lineage of women in chemical practice: “Though rarely noted, women have been active participants in the chemical sciences since the beginning of recorded history.”

Chemical analysis of surviving perfume residues from the ancient Near East confirms the sophisticated understanding of extraction and preservation techniques described in Tapputi’s formula. Recent research projects have even attempted to recreate her perfume based on the formula preserved in KAR 220. In 2023, a team of scientists in Turkey successfully recreated one of her scent formulas by meticulously translating and interpreting the tablet instructions.

For modern chemists and perfumers alike, Tapputi represents a link in an unbroken chain of chemical knowledge that extends from ancient Mesopotamia through Persian and Arabic traditions into modern laboratory science. The basic principles she employed—solvent extraction, filtration, and distillation—remain fundamental to both commercial perfumery and chemical research.

A digital reconstruction laboratory. Archaeologists, chemists, and historians collaborate to recreate Tapputi’s laboratory and methods. Using translations of her formula and archaeological evidence of contemporaneous equipment, they attempt to recreate both her process and its products. The boundaries between archaeology and chemistry dissolve as the team works to resurrect not just artifacts but knowledge systems.

The resurgence of interest in Tapputi extends beyond academic circles. In recent years, she has become a cultural touchstone for discussions about gender and scientific history, particularly within movements encouraging women’s participation in STEM fields. Multiple perfume brands have been named in her honor, and her story features prominently in revised histories of chemistry that acknowledge the discipline’s non-European roots.

Yet this renewed attention brings its own challenges. As Tapputi enters the popular imagination, her historical reality is sometimes obscured by modern projections and cultural needs. Online resources frequently depict her using images of Babylonian goddesses or Sumerian queens—despite clear evidence of her Assyrian context. She is variously described as a feminist, scientist, or entrepreneur—concepts that would have been utterly foreign to her lived experience.

As noted in a comprehensive study of her representation: “Online, Tappūtī-Bēlet-ekallim is presented as a feminist, a scientist, and an entrepreneur. Yet, those concepts would have been utterly foreign to her lived experience… In making her an exception and patron saint, we lose the voices of the thousands of collaborators who helped create the idea of perfume as we know it.”

This tension reflects broader questions about how we relate to historical figures across vast cultural and temporal distances. When we acknowledge Tapputi as the first named chemist in history, are we accurately recognizing her contribution, or are we merely assimilating her into our modern conception of what constitutes science?

The camera pulls back through a spiraling corridor where perfume vessels and cuneiform tablets float in a choreographed dance, their contents intermingling across time. Light refracts through ancient glass, casting prismatic shadows across museum displays and laboratory equipment. A voice speaks: “When ancient knowledge and modern understanding converge, a new perspective emerges—neither purely historical nor entirely contemporary, but an alchemy that transforms our relationship to the past.”

What emerges from this shadowy intersection of archaeological fragment and chemical principle is not merely historical curiosity but a profound reconsideration of how we understand the development of systematic knowledge about material transformation. Tapputi stands as a kind of temporal translator, connecting realms that most experience as disconnected—the ancient practice of perfumery and the modern discipline of chemistry.

Her story reminds us that what we now call chemistry has roots far deeper than the European scientific revolution, in traditions where material transformation was simultaneously practical craft, sacred ritual, and systematic investigation. For historians of science, Tapputi offers a powerful example of how knowledge persists and transforms across millennia.

For contemporary practitioners in both chemistry and perfumery, Tapputi serves as a reminder that their work exists within a lineage extending back to the earliest civilizations. The basic principles she employed—extraction, distillation, filtration—remain fundamental to both laboratory science and commercial perfumery today.

The next time you open a chemistry textbook or uncap a perfume bottle, consider for a moment the invisible connections between these seemingly separate experiences—and the remarkable woman who, nearly 3,200 years ago, systematized the transformation of matter into meaning and molecules into memory.

Tapputi is documented in authentic cuneiform tablets dating to the Middle Assyrian period (approximately 1200-1400 BCE). Unlike mythological figures, she is mentioned in a technical document that includes specific chemical procedures attributed to her. The tablet naming her (KAR 220) is a scholarly concordance on perfumery housed in the Vorderasiatisches Museum in Berlin and has been authenticated by multiple scholars of Assyriology.

Her name has two components. “Tapputi” is her personal name, while “Belatekallim” is a title meaning “Mistress of the Palace” or “Female Overseer of the Palace.” This indicates she held an official position within the royal administration, not simply that she was a skilled perfumer.

While Tapputi is the first named individual associated with systematic chemical processes in the historical record, chemical activities like metallurgy, dyeing, brewing, and early forms of perfumery existed before her time. It would be more accurate to say she is the first named chemist whose procedures we have documented in writing, rather than the absolute first person to engage in chemical practices.

The tablet containing Tapputi’s formula describes what appears to be an early form of distillation, making it one of the earliest documented descriptions of this process. However, archaeological evidence suggests that distillation techniques may have been used before her time. Her contribution was likely in systematizing and documenting the process rather than inventing it outright.

[1] Angioi, R. (2024). “The first chemist in history may have been a female perfumer – here’s how the science of scents has changed since.” The Conversation, June 21, 2024.

[2] Houlihan, S., & Wotiz, J. H. (1975). “Women in chemistry before 1900.” Journal of Chemical Education, 52(6), 362.

[3] Levey, M. (1956). “Babylonian Chemistry: A Study of Arabic and Second Millennium B.C. Perfumery.” Osiris, 12, 376-389.

[4] Levey, M. (1973). Early Arabic Pharmacology: An Introduction Based on Ancient and Medieval Sources. Brill Archive, p. 9.

[5] “Tappūtī-Bēlet-ekallim: The First Perfumer?” Death Scent, July 12, 2022. https://deathscent.com/2022/07/12/tapputi-belatekallim/

[6] Kass-Simon, G., Farnes, P., & Nash, D. (Eds.). (1999). Women of Science: Righting the Record. Indiana University Press, p. 301.

[7] Rayner-Canham, M., & Rayner-Canham, G. (2005). Women in Chemistry: Their Changing Roles from Alchemical Times to the Mid-Twentieth Century. Chemical Heritage Foundation.

[8] “The 3,200-year-old perfume of Tapputi, the first female chemist in history came to life again.” The Archaeologist, July 25, 2022.

[9] “Tappūtī-Bēlet-ekallim, The Oldest Perfumer on Record.” World Sensorium, 2023.