And of Course — It Was a Woman: Tapputi, the World’s First Perfumer

In the mists of Babylon, nearly 3,200 years ago, when kings built ziggurats to brush the sky and gods were thought to live in scent and flame, there worked a woman whose name still lingers like perfume across millennia. Her name was Tapputi-Belatekallim — “Tapputi, Overseer of the Palace” — and she is remembered as the world’s first recorded perfumer, the earliest known chemist, and one of humanity’s first alchemists of the invisible.

The Woman Behind the Name

Tapputi lived around 1200 BCE, during the reign of the Assyrian king Tukulti-Ninurta I. Her name appears on a fragmentary cuneiform tablet discovered in the archives of the royal palace at Babylon — a record that immortalized her as a woman of science in an age ruled by gods and kings.

In the clay inscription, she is called “Tapputi-Belatekallim” — Belatekallim meaning “overseer of the palace.” This was no minor title. It marked her as a supervisor, likely in charge of perfumery and ritual chemistry for the royal household. She managed resources, formulated fragrances, and probably prepared ointments and anointing oils used in ceremonies for both the king and the gods.

That a woman held this position — and that her name was written down — is extraordinary. In a culture where few individuals were recorded outside of royalty or priesthood, Tapputi’s recognition suggests mastery so profound that even scribes could not omit her from history.

The tablet describing Tapputi’s work is damaged, but what survives reads like an ancient laboratory notebook. It lists ingredients — flowers, oil, calamus, myrrh, cypress, balsam — and describes her process with meticulous precision.

She distilled, filtered, and repeated the process multiple times, using water and solvents to extract the pure essence of each ingredient. This is the earliest known description of distillation, over a thousand years before Greek alchemists would record similar methods.

Her tools were simple yet ingenious:

• Clay and bronze stills for distillation.

• Alembic-like vessels for vapor collection.

• Stone mortars for grinding botanicals.

• Porous filters made of cloth or fine mesh.

• Copper cauldrons over charcoal fires for steady heat control.

Her laboratory — or stillroom — would have been a blend of the sacred and the scientific. Shelves of amphorae filled with resins, reeds, and precious oils; smoke from the burners mingling with the scents of myrrh and cypress; symbols of deities inscribed to protect the purity of the mixtures.

Reconstructing Tapputi’s perfume from her ingredients gives us a glimpse — not only of her art, but of her world.

Tapputi’s Blend:

• Calamus: a spicy-sweet reed with notes of cinnamon and ginger — symbol of clarity and purity.

• Cypress: woody, green, and sacred to death and renewal — often used in funerary rites and temple incense.

• Myrrh: resinous, bitter-sweet, used for embalming and offerings — scent of immortality.

• Balsam: deep, rich, and warm — the base that carries the blend.

• Water or date wine as the solvent — gentle distillation to capture volatile oils.

When combined, these ingredients would yield a deeply resinous, spicy, and balsamic perfume, balanced between earth and spirit. It would cling to the skin like sun-warmed bark, evoking both temple incense and desert wind.

To wear such a perfume was to participate in the divine.

To make it — as Tapputi did — was to converse with the gods.

Tapputi the Chemist

In her method, we see not just artistry but empirical science:

• Controlled heating to release volatile compounds.

• Sequential extraction to maximize yield.

• Repetition — a primitive form of quality assurance.

• Filtration and condensation, anticipating the principles of organic chemistry.

Her work shows a deep understanding of chemical processes, long before chemistry existed as a discipline. This is why modern historians regard Tapputi as the world’s first chemist, predating Zosimos of Panopolis and Maria the Jewess by over a millennium.

Tapputi’s creations were likely used to anoint kings, sanctify idols, and seal royal covenants. Her work was both political and spiritual: she was a gatekeeper of the divine aroma.

Thus, her perfume was not simply fragrance — it was alchemy of the soul, distilling essence into transcendence.

Tapputi’s name survives as a whisper on a broken tablet — yet her legacy is vast.

She represents:

• The first recorded female scientist.

• The birth of chemistry and perfumery as structured disciplines.

• The sacred feminine in science — the forgotten lineage of women who blended intuition and experimentation.

Today, modern perfumers and historians alike pay homage to her. Tapputi has inspired distilleries, research projects, and artistic reconstructions of her ancient fragrances. Each one tries, in its own way, to capture the scent that once perfumed the halls of Babylon.

Before the Greeks named alchemy, before the chemists spoke of molecules and bonds, there was Tapputi — standing over her stills, coaxing spirit from matter. She was scientist, priestess, and artist in one. Her work was invisible but immortal, just like scent itself.

History often forgets its foremothers. But the air remembers.

And so, when you breathe deep and feel beauty in a fragrance —

know that the first to distill the invisible into wonder

was a woman.