The Ancient Greeks Said This Perfume Resin Grew in Goats' Beards. They Were Nearly Right.

Around the fifth century BCE, the Greek historian Herodotus wrote down a claim so odd that it has been quoted ever since. Describing the perfumes of Arabia, he says that a resin the Arabians call ladanon comes from the beards of male goats. In G. C. Macaulay's translation: "though it is the most sweet-scented of all things, it comes in the most evil-scented thing, since it is found in the beards of he-goats, produced there like resin from wood." He adds that it is used to make many perfumes, and that the Arabians burn it more than anything else as incense.

Where it really came from

Herodotus had the source wrong, but he had the goats right. Ladanon is what we now call labdanum, a sticky, fragrant resin that coats the leaves and stems of rockrose shrubs in the genus Cistus. The gum rockrose, Cistus ladanifer, grows in the western Mediterranean, and the pink rockrose, Cistus creticus, in the east. The Spanish name for the first, jara pringosa, simply means "sticky shrub."

Goats and sheep that browsed on these shrubs picked the resin up on their beards and thighs, and in ancient times people collected it by combing it out. The resin was not growing in the beard. The animals were only carrying it there.

A rake with leather teeth

Collectors also had a tool for the job. It was called the lambadistrion, and it is described as a kind of rake with a double row of leather thongs fixed on instead of teeth. Crete was a known collection site in the nineteenth century.

A very old trade good

Labdanum was moving between countries long before Herodotus wrote about it. Two passages in the book of Genesis (37:25 and 43:11) mention a resin, traditionally identified as labdanum, being carried to Egypt from Canaan.

How it is made now

Today the raw resin is usually extracted by boiling the leaves and twigs. From there it can be turned into an absolute with solvents or into an essential oil by steam distillation. Labdanum is the main material used to make the scent of amber in perfumery, and it is also valued as a fixative and as a substitute for ambergris, which is banned in some places.

In our catalog, 412 perfumes list labdanum as a note, and it is most often a base note, about 70 percent of the time. So the next time a perfume is described as amber, remember that the supply chain behind that word once involved goats.