Aphrodite is the Greek goddess of love, beauty and good living – and also the goddess of the magic of perfume. Her myths speak of her sweet fragrance of crocus, saffron and rose, and her temples in Corinth, Paphos and Athens were overflowing with offerings of sacred scents and holy oils and ancient perfumes of Aphrodite.
But exactly what perfumes did the ancient priestesses distill to honour aphrodite?
And how was perfume used in the temples of ancient Greece?
Let’s dive in!
The role of Perfume in the ancient Temples of Aphrodite
Once upon a time, long before the Classical Ancient Greece we all think of today, Aphrodite’s isle of Cyprus was considered the heart of perfume throughout the mediterranean.
Cyprus is the birthplace (or more accurately, rebirth-place) of the goddess Aphrodite. Aphrodite was first known on this island by her title Anassa the Queen, then as Kypris, the embodiment of the rich island seamed with copper and gold, and then in the Hellenic era she was renamed as our divine Aphrodite.
Perfume was used liberally in the temples of Aphrodite. It was a requirement that the temples of the gods had to be sweet-smelling and were perfumed by incense, oils and perfumes. More holy oils and ancient perfumes of Aphrodite would be required for festivals and ceremonies, for anointing the statues and the sacred stones, the devotees and the priestesses.
It’s likely that the process of ensouling the statues and sacred stones in the temples would have involved lots of potent, powerful and perfumed sacred oils. Ensouling is the process of literally filling the statues with the soul and energy of the Divine so that they would become a physical representation of that god or goddess, so if you entered the temple, Aphrodite would literally have a vessel to bring her energy though – the bible called these vessel statues idols and did not like them. A big part of the role of the priests and priestesses of these temples was to tend to the vessel of the Goddess.
Throughout the ancient world perfume was used by every level of society, not just for the high temples. Scents would have had particular purposes in the ancient world – unlike the scent free-for-all we experience today!
In classical Greece (that’s when we think about as ancient Greece, around 500-300 BCE) there were particular scents for athletes, for politicians, for priests and temple devotees. It’s likely that the most precious and scarce essential oils were reserved for the temples, and everyday folk would have used more less expensive infused oils – in fact there are records of workers in Egypt receiving scented oils as part of their payment package.
In ancient Cyprus perfume was shared liberally with everyone. Oils were used to anoint not only the statues and stones of Aphrodite, but also to adorn the girls and women who came to the temple with the ancient perfumes of Aphrodite- perfume was a part of life on the isle of Aphrodite, and Cyprus’ particular perfumes were so exquisite and adored throughout the ancient world that they were exported across the mediterranean.
We know quite a bit about what kinds of perfume Cyprus and the temples of Aphrodite created and used because we discovered a very well preserved 4000 year old perfume shop and factory on the coast of Cyprus in 2003! How lucky!
The Perfume House
Down the coast from the great Aphrodite temple and city of Paphos once lived the ancient town of Kourion, and today we are rediscovering incredible perfume houses and factories that are telling us the secrets of the scents of the goddess!
Located in the centre of the artisan district in Kourion, which is now beneath the foundations of the modern town Pyrgos, the Pyrgos Perfume House dates back to 1800 BCE – so it is very very ancient indeed! The Perfume House from lived alongside shops that created medicines, cosmetics, fabrics, wine and metals.
This house had a factory where oils would be created and perfumes would be made, a storehouse filled with giant jars of olive oil, and a decorated shop room were customers would come and choose their perfumes… maybe while musicians played ocarinas and lyres to seduce them into spending more!
(They found musical instruments in the shop room, either for decoration or decadent shopping experiences.)
Down the road from the perfume house was a big olive oil mill that the perfume factory and many of the other little business in town depended on. Olive oil wasn’t really used so much for cooking in ancient times, but it did have hundreds of other essential uses.
This perfume house was not part of a temple complex and in fact is much more ancient than the temple of Aphrodite at Paphos, which was founded in the 12th century BCE – 600 years after the Perfume House at Pyrgos. Within the ruins of the temple of Paphos we have found many bottles and jars for containing sacred oil and perfume, and it appears that folks would leave offerings of scent in tiny bottles for the Goddess, but we haven’t found the clear ruins of a perfume workshop with distilleries and maceration pits as part of a known Aphrodite temple…. yet.
Perhaps the temples just exported the perfume making to the experts in town, who were close to all the things (and olive oil) they needed to make divine fragrance!
What scents did the ancient perfume houses of Aphrodite work with?
We have been able to analyse the plant residue from the distilleries, storage jars and perfume bottles at the Pyrgos perfume house to discover many different kinds of plants that were crafted into ancient perfumes of Aphrodite, including:
🌿 coriander
🌺 labdanum (also known as rock rose)
🌿 marjoram
🌰bitter almond
🌿 myrtle
🍋 bergamot,
🌳 oak moss
🌿 lavender
🌳 pine
🌿 sage
🌳 laurel
🌿 rosemary
🌸 chamomile
🌿 parsley
🌸 rose
All of these plants were native to the ancient isle of Cyprus, whose landscape was far more lush and green 4000 years ago than it was today – a true Aphrodisian paradise!
We also know that Cyprus was also producing incredible specialty perfume ingredients such as iris root (orris), styrax, and neroli and trading them across the mediterranean sea with the ancient Minoan culture.
These would probably have been crazy pricy – iris root requires a three year maturation period between uprooting it and processing it for perfume, and neroli is still one of the most expensive oils in the world today!
(We also know that scents and resins like frankincense and myrrh would have been imported for use in the temples, even though they did not grow native in Cyprus and had to be ordered from Syria, Ethopia and Yemen).
The Cyprus perfumiers favoured herby and woody scents with a citrus bite – pine, oakmoss or labdanum was often a key base note, with heart notes of herby marjoram, oregano and lavender and a high note of neroli. This herby-woody-citrusy smell was so well loved and influential in the history of perfume that there is a modern fragrance family named Chypre in honour of the native scents of the Aphrodite Isle.
If you were curious and wanted to get a whiff of a mainstream modern Chypre-inspired perfume is like, you could smell Miss Dior by Dior, Si by Giorgio Armani, or Mitsouko by Guerlain,
How did they make perfume in ancient Cyprus?
Ancient perfumes were very different to the ones we are used to today.
Today perfumes are usually blended in pure alcohol, and the oils are distilled and extracted from plants as essential oils – laborious work that asks for astronomical amounts of flowers, leaves and resin to produce these magical little bottles of scent… or even more usually the natural oils and scents are replaced by synthetic copies of the fragrance chemicals of the plants called aromachemicals.
Ancient perfumes contained only natural materials blended in oils and fats and were presented as either an oil or as a solid perfume, sometimes called an ointment.
So how did the perfumers of the Aphrodite oils get those amazing scents for their perfumes?
We know from the distillery equipment and perfume remains that have been found at Phrygos that olive oil was liberally used in the perfume making process. There was a big olive oil mill at the end of the road from the Perfume House that pressed the olive oil the perfumiers needed.
The olive oil required for perfume is very specific – it was cold-pressed from unripe olives early in the season, so it wasn’t the same as the olive oil we can get in the shops today, and would not have been very edible.
In Cyprus the perfumers created many perfumes using olive oil infusion process.
Making Perfumes in Olive Oil.
They would place the fragrant plant matter (rosemary, coriander, parsley etc.) in a clay pot with half rainwater and half special olive oil and half-bury the pot in hot ashes in a pit – the spout of the clay pot would poke high above the surface of the ashes, allowing the water to evaporate from the potion.
The heating is an important part of the infusion process – we still heat herbs in oil in modern herbalism today to get their scent and medicine out of them.
The perfume workshop in Pyrgos has many of these pits in their factory so they could infuse LOTS of oils.
After a week or so they would uncover the pots, strain the oil and squeeze the plant matter to get all the oily goodness out… and then they would repeat the whole process again using the same oil with a new batch of plants and herbs.
This method of doing infusion upon infusion in the same oil would create a much stronger scent… and they might infuse different kinds of plants, flowers or herbs over time into the same oil to make a layered perfume with many notes.
Sadly we don’t have any recorded recipes of how they did this, as perfumery was a closely guarded trade secret in the ancient world – it’s impossible to find accurate recipes from Egypt either. No one wanted to share their recipes!
They used this oil infusion method for resins too as far as I can tell, grinding up and infusing pine resin into the warm oil.
Distilling essential oils in ancient Cyprus!
The ancient perfumers of Cyprus sometimes used distillation to extract the oils out of the plants too.
To understand how ancient distillation works, let’s pretend we have a big bushel of Rosemary that we want to extract the oil from.
- We would strip the leaves from the swigs and place them in this big special pot. This pot has a double rim, meaning it has the big inner bowl for the leaves to go in, and around the ring of the bowl a shallow donut-shaped channel. The donut channel might have a little spout or lip, so that liquid can leave the channel and drip into a waiting cup.
- Water would be poured into the big bowl over the leaves.
- The conical lid of the distillery pot would be placed on top – it’s edges would rest in the donut-shaped channel.
- The pot would be placed high over a low fire so that the water would heat and simmer but never boil, and the oils would be released from the rosemary leaves. As the water boils, it transforms into steam rising from the water… then touches the conical lid of the still. There steam will condensate on the lid, forming little droplets that drip down the side of the lid and land in the donut channel. The channel fills up with scented water, now known as a hydrosol, and the essential oil of our rosemary floats on top of the oil.
- If the donut channel has a lip or spot, the water and oil will drip into a waiting beaker.
And hey presto! At the end you will have a small beaker of water with a little bit of pure essential oil on the top.
Here is a photo of a tripod distiller from Cyprus:
I’ve drawn some pictures to illustrate this kind of still and how it would work – take a peek!
And here is how it would work on the inside;
They had a couple different kinds of stills – the double-rim still is among the most ancient designs, known to be used in mesopotamia, but they also used a still where the lid was big and bulbous like a onion and had a spout to funnel the condensed water and oil away.
Here is a picture of one of those bad boys reconstructed in the Limassol Museum:
And my little illustration of how it would work:
Experimental archaeologists made a replica of one of these kind of stills and very successfully created essential oil using it – the whole process of distilling the oil took about three hours.
Hooray for the perfume house and the ancient perfumes of Aphrodite!
Thanks to the buried treasure of the Perfume House in Pyrgos, we now know exactly what kind of scents would have fragranced the streets of Cyprus, what kind of oils they would be adorning the temple with, and a good idea of how they made them too…
… meaning we are so much closer to understanding the importance of scent in the temples of Aphrodite and in the homes of her ancient people.
It’s fascinating in a time when we would more usually associate Aphrodite with seductive scents of ylang ylang, jasmine and vanilla to learn that in her ancient temples and her statues would probably been adorned with oils of rose, oakmoss and bergamot, making a very different kind of ancient perfumes of Aphrodite.
What has learning about the Perfume Houses of Cyprus inspired in you?
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References and Research:
Belgiorno, Maria Rosaria. The Perfume of Cyprus: from Pyrgos to François Coty the route of a legendary charm. Third Revised Edition
University of Missouri: Perfumery in Ancient Greek and Roman Societies
