History

History

The Museu del Parfum, located at Paseo de Gracia 39 in Barcelona, opened its doors to the public in mid-1963 to showcase the historical evolution of perfume bottles and vessels. The texts about the history of perfume and perfume-related items that you can read below are the intellectual property of the Museu del Parfum. Any use of them, in whole or in part, must be authorised by their author, Mr. Ramón Planas Buera. Please visit the contact section of the Perfume Museum website and contact us should you be interested in reproducing this content. Antique bottles are a true reflection of the art and culture of those who used them.

Prehistory

It is often said that the history of perfume is as old as the history of mankind. In the most ancient civilizations, in the most remote cultures, we find literary or archaeological evidence that tell the story aromas, ointments and perfumes.

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Mesopotamia

The first written evidence discovered about the use of perfumes can be found in the civilizations of Mesopotamia, the cultural birthplace of Western civilization.

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Egypt

Mesopotamian cultures had a significant influence on all the others of their time and on those that followed over the course of history. Among the first is ancient Egypt, which fostered one of antiquity’s most important cosmetic and perfume industries.

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Israel

We mentioned that the Egyptians imported products from different places to make their ointments and fragrances, and it is curious to note the fact, as told in the Bible, that Joseph, son of Jacob, was sold by his brothers to spice merchants from the lands of Gilead in Palestine, who were on their way to Egypt to sell their products.

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Greece

Following the thread of the history of perfume we arrive at one of its most important milestones: Greece. Everything that represented beauty, aesthetics, harmony, proportion, and balance had a divine origin in classical Greece and was personified in divinities and mythological heroes. It is not strange, therefore, that they believed that the ointments and perfumes that contributed to this exaltation of beauty also had a divine origin.

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Etruscan

The Etruscans, a civilization of ancient Italy that corresponds roughly to the present-day Tuscany region, developed its own unique cultural identity, different from that of its neighbours, and mysterious in its origins.

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Phoenicians and Carthage

The Phoenicians, Canaanites by race and Semites by language, settled on a small strip of land between the sea and the mountains of Lebanon 7,000 years ago. They were a skilful, intelligent and industrious people, who became prosperous by trading in two products which they had at their disposal: purple for dyeing cloth, which they extracted from the murex, a sea snail, and the wood from the cedars that grew on the mountains of Lebanon.

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Rome

The Greeks, through their colonies in the Mediterranean, spread the Near East taste for perfume to the coasts of France and Spain, Rome’s first barbers and perfumers moved from a Greek colony in southern Italy to settle in Rome during the time of the Republic.

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Islam

In the East, the Byzantine Empire, heir to Rome, took over the art of perfume and developed a thriving industry, perhaps more than that of Rome itself, due to the proximity of raw ingredients and workforce of people from its eastern neighbours who had a tradition in perfume-making; Rome was a country that eminently relied on imports.

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Renaissance

Venice and Florence were the perfume capitals during the Renaissance. The formulas of old compositions were recovered, and perfume returned with force in Europe. The Medici and Doge courts in Venice were perfumed courts.

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Commercial Perfume

France became the empire of perfumes. Glove makers sold fragrances along with perfumed gloves imported from southern Spain, where the Moors had introduced the perfumed goatskin industry.

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