Five thousand years of cosmetics in Greater Iran
Lecture by Fatema Soudavar
As archeological excavations uncover increasingly revealing finds, the study of cosmetics is coming into its own, no longer as a sideline of costume or aesthetics, but as an independent field, the implications of which extend into the study of rituals, fashions, botany, mineralogy, chemical synthesis, long-distance trade and cultural exchanges, in other words all the essentials of the development of early civilizations. The excavations on the Iranian plateau and in the Bactrian-Margian Archaeological Complex have pushed back the frontiers of the first use of cosmetics to the fourth millennium BCE, even earlier than recorded for ancient Egypt. This talk will begin by providing a background on the early development of cosmetics in prehistory, and briefly examine the use of cosmetics in antiquity in the Iranian world with allusions to similarities with the Greco-Roman world and China. The second part will focus on the Islamic period when cosmetics came to be listed as seven items. Finally, the longest part will be devoted to each of the seven items separately, not only in historical terms, but with emphasis on their composition and mode of use, with greater emphasis on the Qajar period for which more pictorial and textual information is available.