Tapputi

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Tapputi, also called Tapputi-Belatekallim (Belatekallim means a female palace overseer), is one of the world’s first chemists and a perfume-maker from ancient Mesopotamia. A cuneiform tablet from about 1200 BC in Babylon mentions her. She used flowers, oil, calamus, cyperus, myrrh, and balsam, then added water or other liquids and repeatedly distilled and filtered. This is the oldest known still. Tapputi was an overseer at the Royal Palace and worked with a researcher named —ninu (the first part of the name is lost). She wrote the first known treatise on perfume making, preserved on a clay tablet, and developed a method to use solvents to make scents lighter and longer-lasting.