Some travel to find rare and exotic perfumes, while some stay at home conveniently waiting for perfumes from other places to be gifted or delivered to them. May you are at home or traveling, attar is a perfume that will make you feel like you travel back to the old world and visit places where it is being made.
Let’s take a peek back to the history of attar to know who made this old perfume be commercially sold in the old ages.
Attar Etymology
Attar is derived from the ancient Persian word ‘itir’ or ‘atir’ which means scent. This word is said to have originated from ‘itr’ (عطر), which means ‘perfume’ in the Arabic language. (5,6)
Others refer to this old perfumery as ‘ittar’ or ‘itra’. It is sometimes spelled as atar, or athar. Alternative words for it are ottar, otter, otto, and âta. (6) The term and spelling for this perfume seem to depend on the place where it is being used.
History
Ancient Egyptians are known to prepare their botanical perfumes by crushing the plants and infusing them with a base oil (1). Meanwhile, water hydro-distillation was attributed to Ibn Sina or Avicenna who was a Persian physician. (1) It was said that Ibn Sina was able to make attar through distillation using flowers. (5)
Mountainous flowers were used for making ittar in Yemen. Since this was considered a special variety of ittar, it was given as a gift to the royals of Arabia. This was also introduced reduced used by Yemeni Queen, Arwa al-Sulayhi. (5)
Other notable people in history who have used attar were documented. Abul Fazal Faizee purported that attar can be used in making Mabkhara-incense-burner. While Ghazi-ud-Din Haidar Shah, who was a ruler in Awadh, perfumed his bedroom by making a fountain of attar to achieve a well-scented and romantic atmosphere. (5)
Arabians have already discovered the distillation process in the 10-11th centuries. (2) The distillation for perfume making was introduced by the Arabs to the Indians, (2) and since then, the Indians manufactured their perfume by using the traditional methods. For years, India is known to be one of the top producers of Attar. They are known to have improved the process of perfume-making by adopting both ancient Arabian and Persian innovations and merging it with ancient traditions. (3) The perfume-making expertise of Indians was documented in the book Ni’matnama, or the Book Of Delights, written by the King of Malwa Ghiyath Shahi, sometime in the late 1400s.
It was said that Jahangir, a Mughal emperor, influenced the rampant use of attar as he encouraged the people to formulate natural scents. This has resulted in the attar-making culture. The appreciation of Mughal emperor Jahangir is seemed to be credited to the fascination of his wife empress Noor Jahan in bathing in water perfumed with rose petals. (4)
History thus shows us that attar is indeed a thousand-year-old regal perfume.
Traceback perfume wisdom
References:
(1) https://www.nationalgeographic.com/travel/article/how-did-kannauj-become-a-perfume-capital
(3) https://www.deccanherald.com/amp/content/492811/attar-town-waits-french-push.html
(4) https://www.thehindubusinessline.com/blink/know/fading-scent-of-attar/article24529529.ece/amp/
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