Abstract

In this talk, I make the case that Greco-Egyptian perfumery and alchemy are more closely related than usually assumed. I do this by exploring sources related to what I call the “Venerean arts”: Greek discussions of arts associated with Aphrodite or Venus that involve transforming something plain into something more luxurious, e.g., fabric dyeing, the production of artificial stones and the production of metals (the ancestors of alchemy). The practical, lexical, and conceptual similarities across these different arts is noted regularly in ancient technical sources; modern scholars, however, have missed them. I proceed in two parts. The first is negative: it shows that some technical terminology of Greco-Egyptian perfumery has been misunderstood due to the influence of later medieval translations. The second part is positive: it provides evidence that this technical terminology refers to analogous processes in perfumery, dyeing and alchemy in ancient Greek and Latin sources before the fifth century CE. Whether these similarities are due to the use of common ingredients and methods, or whether they imply a common way of understanding artistic production and material change is a question I explore at the end.