Tapputi

Who is Tapputi?

Tapputi, also referred to as Tapputi-Belatekallim, is considered to be the world’s first chemist, a perfume-maker mentioned in a cuneiform tablet from the second millennium BC in Babylonian Mesopotamia. She used flowers, oil, and calamus along with cyperus, myrrh, and balsam. She added water then distilled and filtered several times. This is also the oldest referenced still.

She also was an overseer at the Royal Palace, and worked with a researcher named-ninu, whose first part of her name has been lost.