In the eighth century BC , Homer described how the goddess Aphrodite anointed Hector’s corpse with rose oil. In our era, the first-century Greek physician and pharmacologist Dioscorides, in his De Materia Medica, mentioned a rose product called rhodium, from the Greek word rhodon, meaning “rose.” But when classical writers spoke of “rose oil” they undoubtedly referred not to the attar we know today, but to fatty oils heavily perfumed with rose by the technique called “enfleurage.”As used by the ancient Egyptians, enfleurage involved steeping flower petals in purified animal fat and replacing them as soon as their perfumes had penetrated it. (A similar process, called “maceration,” uses hot oil instead of fat.) The perfumed fat was used to make a scented ointment, or unguent. These fragrant balms became known as “pomades,” a term which includes aromatic fatty oils employed both for remedial and for aesthetic purposes.

Egyptian wall paintings show cones or balls of pomade atop the heads of Egyptian ladies. Today, small quantities of pomade are still manufactured by virtually the same methods in the region of Grasse, in France.

Rose water was distilled by the Arabs at least as early as the ninth century, when al-Kindi wrote his Kitab Kimya’ al-‘Itr wa al-Tas‘idat (Book of Perfume Chemistry and Distillation), but the earliest source that claims to document the origin of attar as a derivative of rose water comes from India. The 17th-century Mughal emperor Jahangir, in his memoirs, credits the discovery of attar of roses to his mother-in-law, Salima Sultan Begum. “This ‘itr is a discovery which was made during my reign by the mother of Nur Jahan Begum,” he writes. “When she was making rose water, a scum formed on the surface of the dishes into which the hot rose water was poured from the jugs. She collected this scum little by little; when much rose water was obtained a considerable quantity of the scum was collected. It is of such strength in perfume that if one drop be rubbed on the palm of the hand it scents a whole assembly and it seems as if many red rosebuds had bloomed at once. There is no other scent of equal excellence to it. It restores hearts that have gone and brings back withered souls. In reward for that invention, I presented a string of pearls to the inventor. Salima Sultan Begum—may the light of God be upon her tomb—gave this oil the name ‘itr-i-Jahangiri.”

We have no such documentation on the origins of cohobation, the technique that is the key to maximizing the yield of attar. There are no certain reports of its use by the early Muslim alchemists, no mention in literature, and no description of it in any travel account earlier than the second half of the 16th century. We have only one clue, from etymology, that the technique may be of Arab origin. The word kohob was used by Paracelsus to mean “repetition,” and that word may derive from Arabic ka‘aba, “to repeat [an action].”

My belief is that cohobation was developed independently in Europe, India and the Arab world, probably—in the case of Europe—in the mid-16th century: A European source dated 1574 names Geronimo Rossi of Ravenna as the first to accomplish cohobation, and oleum rosarum distillatum—distilled oil of roses—appears in German apothecaries’ price lists of the 1580’s.

There is also a theory that places the invention in Bulgaria, an important rose-growing country for the past 350 or 400 years. Its adherents point out that multiple distillation was already a well-understood technology in Bulgaria by the time the Ottomans brought the oil-bearing rose there in the first half of the 17th century. To the north of what is now known as the Rose Valley, in the villages around the towns of Gabrovo, Sevlievo and Troyan, plum brandy had been produced for years, its strength and quality increased by repeated distillation. The Ottomans discouraged the production of alcohol, but the distilleries, and the technique of cohobation, were easily adapted to the production of attar of roses.

In my opinion, the world’s most beautiful attars today come from Bulgaria, Saudi Arabia and Russia, each with a subtle yet distinctive nuance: of spice, honey and softer-hued tonalities respectively. To the many successive generations of inventors who made the production of such beauty possible, we owe our thanks.