The Babylonian Roots to Early Middle Eastern Perfumery (online)
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Online event
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Academic Nuri McBride explores how specialised trades like perfumery preserved skills and techniques from antiquity into the Middle Ages.
About this event
This class takes place on Zoom and will be recorded. We will share the video for this class with registered participants for 3 days after it takes place.
For centuries European Academia thought that once the knowledge to read cuneiform was lost, the technological advancements of Ancient Mesopotamia became utterly inaccessible. At the same time, the astronomic rise of chemical and alchemical education in the Arabic speaking work shortly after the rise of Islam was viewed as an anomaly. We will challenge these notions in this class and instead examine how specialised trades like perfumery preserved skills and techniques from antiquity into the Middle Ages. That collective trade knowledge served as the bedrock from which the great scholars of the Islamic Golden Age developed and explained the understanding of chemistry, which impacts us even today.
Takeaways:
- Discuss Babylonian and Assyrian distillation technology.
- Briefly examine the perfume trade in Southwest Asia and North Africa from Late Antiquity to the rise of Islam.
- Examine the desire for alchemical/chemical knowledge in the educational capitals of early Islam such as Alexandria, Harran, Jundi-Shapur, and Baghdad.
- Examine how among the noteworthy academies and scholars of this time, there was a fascination with distillation and perfumery that drove them to learn from skilled tradespeople and write extensively on the subject, which significantly advanced perfumery and chemistry.
This is an online class. The Zoom link will be sent by email 24 hours before the class.
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This event is presented as part of our relaunched 'Scent and Society' series. Scent and Society is an ongoing exploration of the multiplicity of perfume histories across time, and across the world.
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ABOUT NURI MCBRIDE
Nuri McBride is an academic, activist, writer, and perfumer focused primarily on the preservation of olfactive cultural heritage. Her main area of interest is in the importance of aromatics in life-cycle rituals, particularly surrounding death and dying. This interest grew out of Nuri's personal work in end of life care and witnessing the emotional power scent can hold for the bereaved. In 2015, she began the Death/Scent project to explore the use of aromatics in death practices around the world. Nuri is a long time advocate for greater death awareness education and an end to funeral poverty. She also incorporates scent in her guided death meditation classes as a profound way to connect the participants to the physical, intellectual, and emotional state of examining their mortality.
Links: Website / Twitter / Instagram / Facebook
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ATTENDANCE AND REFUND POLICY
This is an online class that will take place on Zoom. The Zoom link will be sent by email approximately 24 hours before the class. Lest this email end up in your spam folder, please be sure to add hello@artandolfaction.com and noreply@event.eventbrite.com to your address book.
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+ Please download and install Zoom before the class starts, to avoid last minute technical issues.
+ Please attend, live! Learn more about how we teach here: https://artandolfaction.online/how-we-teach and our community guidelines here: https://artandolfaction.online/community-guidelines
+ There are no refunds or transfers for this class. Note also that event tickets are non-transferable.
Image credits: Page 2 of Arabic manuscript on Alchemy by Razes. Credit: Wellcome Collection. Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0)
Michael Geiger on Unsplash
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