Roman incense and perfume: the unused cameo

Ros Ereira, cameo producer

Sadly, this cameo was not used in the programme. This was not because it was not successful, because it was. Rather it was because when I was thinking about what we should do in this programme, along with everyone else I was under the impression that we were going to be digging up a Roman temple. So I set about arranging a cameo all about the making of perfumes and incenses for use in Roman temples. Unfortunately for the cameo (but very excitingly for the programme) we didn't find a Roman temple but a prehistoric site instead – which meant that our lovely Roman perfumes and incenses didn't end up illustrating the site as well as we would have hoped . . .

Nonetheless, Sally did a wonderful job, and the results were beautiful. I still have a bottle of Roman perfume at home for use when the occasion arises! I'm sure Sally will appear on a future programme. On this show, though, you see Phil knapping flint tools instead – which he enjoys so much it's always nice to give him the chance to do it!

Sally Pointer, ancient perfumer

Fragrant offerings
Archaeology often turns out to be more complicated than it first appears, and this was the case when I was invited to explore the fragrant offerings that may have been used at the site of a possible Roman temple.

Based on known information about Roman ritual we decided these offerings may have been of incense and fragrant oils or perfume, and attempted a reconstruction of a complex incense and a valuable perfume. We don't know to what extent the use of these products in Britain may have matched their use elsewhere in the Roman empire, but we did try to balance British ingredients such as sedge roots and pine resin with exotic imports such as frankincense, which we know was being used in Britain during the Roman period.

Incense
Incense is a commodity that we know was widely used, but for which very few recipes survive. Carenza and I experimented with a rich and exotic recipe based on descriptions of kyphi, which was originally an important Egyptian incense that gradually became known in secular Roman writings as the centuries passed. This used a thick paste of raisins and honey into which ground resins and herbs were mixed until we could shape the mixture into sticky pellets that would be smouldered on lit charcoal to provide a dense fragrant smoke.

Perfume
Perfume is much easier to document in the Roman period. Several writers wrote about it and one, Dioscorides, even provided recipes. We chose to attempt one of the most complex and expensive scents that he recorded.

Megalion is an oil-based perfume that involves boiling sweet flag root in olive oil for up to ten days and nights to prepare it for the other ingredients. We only had a few hours, so we had to keep a careful eye on the oil to make sure we didn't singe it on the fire. Spices such as cinnamon and cassia are familiar kitchen flavours today, but they were extremely expensive during the Roman period. This recipe used quantities of these, together with myrrh resin and burnt pine resin, to create a rich, spicy perfume that would have been worn by rich Romans as well as making a suitable offering to the gods.

We had intended to offer samples of these reconstructed perfumes as a kind of libation to the site. However, as the dig progressed it became clear that although there was Roman activity on the site there was actually a much more extensive earlier site just below the scattered Roman deposits and that the Roman remains were not the big story here. So, although we completed our reconstructions it was decided not to use the footage after all. Even so, we were able to give a number of the diggers and visitors a chance to try out these ancient scents and the trenches certainly smelt nice when we were cooking up all the ingredients!

Make your own incense
This is a simplified version of the incense that we made. It is based on a type of incense known to have been used in the ancient world and uses ingredients that you should be able to get fairly easily.

Ingredients:
1 tsp honey
6-8 raisins
2 inch piece of cinnamon bark or quills
1 tsp coriander seeds
1 tsp myrrh resin
1 tsp frankincense resin
A few drops wine (optional)

Start by grinding the honey and raisins to a thick paste using a pestle and mortar. Next, grind up the coriander, cinnamon, frankincense and myrrh to a powder. Mash these into the raisin and honey paste, adding a drop or two of wine if needed until you get a thick dough that you can handle easily. Make little pellets or balls of this and put them on a plate to dry out a little.

When you want to use your incense, light a charcoal disk, put it on a heatproof surface and leave it until it glows. Carefully place an incense pellet on top and you should get a rich, spicy smoke that lasts for some time, filling the air with scent. The original recipes for this type of incense use a lot more ingredients than listed here, but this is a good introduction if you haven't made incense before.

You can find out more about the recipes that we used and experiments with ancient perfumes and cosmetics on Sally Pointer's website: http://www.sallypointer.com.

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