Ancient Egyptians used perfume for religious ritual, burial and embalming, and everyday personal adornment, with scent treated as something genuinely sacred rather than purely decorative.

Fragrance and the gods

Temples burned incense, often kyphi, a complex blended incense made from ingredients like resins, honey and wine, as offerings to the gods, and priests were required to be ritually scented as part of temple duties. Fragrant oils were also used extensively in mummification, both for practical preservation and because certain scents were believed to please the gods and help the soul’s journey into the afterlife. Cleopatra’s association with fragrance, famously perfuming the sails of her ships, is one of the more well-documented examples of scent used deliberately as a tool of image and power.

Everyday use too

Beyond ritual, scented oils and cones of solid perfume worn on wigs, which slowly melted through the day releasing fragrance, were part of ordinary upper-class Egyptian life, alongside scented baths and skin oils used partly for practical protection against the heat and dryness of the climate. Our history of perfume guide and complete guide to perfume go into more of this history.