The still that every essential-oil workshop in the world uses today has a shape defined by Arab and Persian alchemists. They did not invent it — the end of this lesson makes that clear — but they were the ones who turned it into a tool usable on a real scale.
The word alembic in English and French comes from the Arabic al-anbiq. So does the word alcohol. Language has recorded a route that history often forgets.
Three names
Jabir ibn Hayyan, in the eighth century, is credited with many improvements to distillation equipment and to experimental method.
Al-Kindi, in the ninth century, wrote a work on perfume and distillation containing hundreds of recipes — perhaps the earliest systematic treatise on aromatics to survive.
Ibn Sina, in the tenth and eleventh centuries, is often associated with perfecting steam distillation for flower oils. The extent of his personal contribution is still debated, but the role of that period is not.
Rose water before essential oil
The main product of that period was not essential oil but rose water — that is, hydrosol.
The oil was at first just a film floating on top, and it took a long time before it was treated as the main product rather than a by-product.
Rose water was exported from Persia throughout the Islamic world and beyond, becoming a long-distance trade good before Europe had any aromatics industry at all.
Attar
The word attar in Persian and Hindi refers to an oil extracted from flowers, usually taken up in sandalwood oil as a base.
The technique is a hybrid of distillation and oil infusion: the flower vapour is condensed directly into the base oil instead of into water, so the fragrant part is held in the base straight away.
The craft of making attar still lives on in Kannauj, India, with a process almost unchanged over centuries.
What this says about how we tell the story
The history of aromatics is often told as a French story, starting in Grasse in the eighteenth century.
Grasse matters, but it inherited a technique perfected eight centuries earlier somewhere else. What Grasse contributed was industrialisation and commercialisation, not invention.
Fairness is also owed in the other direction. Distillation has precursors in the Greek world — Alexandria, where early condensing devices were described in the first centuries of the Common Era. What the Arab and Persian alchemists did was perfect it to the point of being usable on a real scale, and spread it. The word al-anbiq — itself borrowed from the Greek ambix, the cap of the still — entered the European languages as alembic. The word alcohol also emerged from that period.
Techniques of infusing in oil and of scenting with a carrier — such as lotus-scented tea — are also long-standing traditions in Asia, developed independently of distillation.