The Making of Lily Perfume
Unknown · Twenty-sixth to Thirtieth Dynasty, c. 664-341 BC
Three women in fine raised relief are busy with flowers. One, in a long dress and shawl and a short rounded wig, carries a basket of lilies. Two others, wearing collars and diadems, hold flowers and a ring, the tools of their work. The stone is a fragment of limestone about thirty seven centimetres wide, perhaps from the lintel of a tomb chapel. The carving is delicate: the folds of the dresses, the curls of the wigs and the petals of the lilies are all picked out in low relief. A short line of hieroglyphs above the figures is a caption that names the activity: the making of perfume.
Scenes of perfume production are rare in Egyptian art, and this is one of the best. The lilies were pressed and their oil steeped to make the famous lily perfume that Greek and Roman writers later praised. The style, with its slender figures and soft modelling, places the relief in the Late Period, between the Twenty sixth and Thirtieth Dynasties, from the seventh to the fourth century BC. The Louvre bought the fragment in nineteen hundred and nine.
Did You Know? Egyptian lily perfume was so prized that Greek and Roman writers still ranked it among the finest scents centuries later.
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