Ghāliya: the costly one

A history of the word and the compound, AD 600 to 2026. Reading time: forty minutes, with the register and references after.

More than thirty jars

In the perfume treasury of the Abbasid palace at Baghdad, some time after AD 892, the caliph al-Muʿtaḍid asked the servant in charge how much ghāliya he held. More than thirty china jars, the man answered, made by various caliphs. Which is the best? What al-Wāthiq made. It was brought in on poles, carried by several slaves, and when it was opened the ghāliya was white with mould and solid with age, and exceedingly strong. Al-Muʿtaḍid passed his hand round the neck of the jar to take a little of what had adhered there, without disturbing the top, put it in his beard, said he could not bring himself to ruffle the surface, and had it taken away. His son al-Muktafī, years later, had about thirty mithqāls drawn from the same jar and kept the remainder in his perfume box. His other son al-Muqtadir, drinking with his slave girls, had every jar brought, took a hundred mithqāls from one and fifty from another, flung it about, and had al-Wāthiq's jar emptied by the pound among the women until the eunuch Ṣāfī al-Ḥuramī, who had stood beside all three caliphs and told the story afterwards, wept and asked him to stop (al-Tanūkhī, Nishwār al-muḥāḍara, trans. Margoliouth, Table-Talk of a Mesopotamian Judge, 1922, 154–6; the Ibn al-Jawzī recension of the same report, al-Muntaẓam s.a. AH 295, makes it sixty-odd jars and does not name al-Wāthiq).

The story is told to judge three caliphs. It is quoted here for what it takes for granted. That a perfume could sit in a jar for decades and be the best in the palace. That a ruler would take it by the fingertip from the rim rather than break the surface, so the stuff had a surface, a skin, a head. That it was weighed in mithqāls like gold, was black enough to show as a smear on porcelain, and went in the beard. And that everyone in the room knew its name.

The name is ghāliya (غالية). It means the costly one. This paper follows the word and the preparations that have carried it. Some accounts place their beginnings before Islam; the surviving evidence does not fix that beginning, and for most of the time since, the word and the compound have not meant quite the same thing.

The compound

King's definition is the one to start from: "a dark colored unguent used especially for the anointing of men's facial hair", made "from musk and ambergris made into an ointment with ben oil" (King 2017, 278). Dehkhodā's Persian dictionary says the same and adds one ingredient: musk, ambergris, camphor and ben oil (Dehkhodā, s.v. ghāliye). Ben oil is duhn al-bān, the pressed oil of Moringa peregrina, a tree of the Hijaz and the Red Sea hills; it is nearly odourless and slow to turn, which is why it carried musk for years without adding a smell of its own.

That is the definition. The recipes are wider than the definition, and the table is the evidence. The earliest dated collection is ʿAlī b. Sahl Rabban al-Ṭabarī's Firdaws al-ḥikma, written in AD 850, whose last folio carries the ghāliya formulas (Firdaws, ed. Siddiqi, 611 ff.; King 2011, 154). They were read for this paper on the British Library manuscript Arundel Or 41, a maghribī copy of the late thirteenth century whose final leaf, f. 276, is defective, so the readings below are provisional: they are from the image and want checking against the printed edition. Three grades are legible. A ghāliya min ghawālī l-mulūk, of the kings' ghāliyas: three mithqāls of good musk, one of ambergris, one of good sukk (سكّ, a pressed aromatic of rāmik kneaded with water and musk, in the Qāmūs definition the Cairo editor quotes at al-Nuwayrī 12.58), two of Indian aloeswood, in pure ben oil, the musk ground alone on the slab and sieved through silk, the ambergris melted in glass or stone, the ben dripped onto it, the rest strewn in, the whole put up in a glass vessel. A cheap one built on aloeswood by the dirham with a dāniq of musk. And an economical one, oud a mithqāl, musk a mithqāl, saffron a dāniq, cloves and spikenard, censed, ground, and kneaded bi-duhn bān jayyid, with good ben oil, on which the manuscript ends. Oud is in all three.

Recipe and attribution	Source, proportions, other aromatics, carrier
Umm Abān's perfume, verses attributed to ʿAdī (d. c. AD 600)	Recorded by: al-Jāḥiẓ via al-ʿAskarī 238 Musk and ambergris: musk with crushed ambergris Other aromatics: lubān Carrier: jasmine oil (zanbaq)
Ḥajjājiyya, "called al-Sāhiriyya" (al-Ḥajjāj, d. AD 714)	Recorded by: al-Tamīmī via al-Nuwayrī 12.55–6 Musk and ambergris: 10 : 10 mithqāls (Tibetan musk) Other aromatics: Indian aloeswood 1, saffron 1; "sometimes enhanced with a little camphor" Carrier: good Kufan ben and Nishapur jasmine oil; ambergris dissolved in them over heat, left to cool, the powders beaten in
Hishām b. ʿAbd al-Malik's yellow ghāliya (r. AD 724–743)	Recorded by: al-Tamīmī via al-Nuwayrī 12.56–8 Musk and ambergris: Tibetan musk one and a half ounces, added last; blue ambergris one ounce. Sukk fifteen mithqāls, half kneaded in while the paste is wet and the rest added after drying Other aromatics: spikenard 4 dirhams, Maqāṣīrī sandalwood 3 dirhams, Indian aloeswood 2 ounces, Qummī saffron 1 ounce, Ṭāʾif raisins, fresh marjoram and thyme soaked overnight; kneaded, pressed into a bowl, censed with nadd for three days, formed into discs, dried three days in the shade, then ground and sieved and combined with the dissolved ambergris, the rest of the sukk and the musk Carrier: kneaded with the strained infusion or with old ṭilāʾ, boiled-down must (Lisān al-ʿArab, ṭ-l-y, gives cooked grape juice among the senses); the ambergris dissolved in bān al-ghāliya, the ghāliya-grade ben
Ghāliya of the caliphs, Aḥmad b. Abī Yaʿqūb (al-Yaʿqūbī, d. c. AD 900)	Recorded by: al-Tamīmī via al-Nuwayrī 12.53–4; Yaʿqūbī, Works 1, fr. 8 Musk and ambergris: 100 : 50 (Tibetan musk; blue Shiḥrī ambergris) Other aromatics: none Carrier: good rare ben; smokeless coal fire; gold or silver spoon; sealed in gold, silver or glass
Variants in the same entry	Recorded by: as above Musk and ambergris: 1 : 1 for Ḥumayd al-Ṭūsī, admired by al-Maʾmūn; 3 : 10 "ambergris ghāliya" for Umm Jaʿfar Zubayda Other aromatics: balsam for Muḥammad b. Sulaymān Carrier: ben, or ben with a quarter of jasmine oil for Zubayda
Ibn Māsawayh (d. AD 857), Jawāhir al-ṭīb, closing recipe	Recorded by: Princeton MS Garrett 174B, ff. 13–26 Musk and ambergris: 10 : 5 mithqāls Other aromatics: none Carrier: ben; ambergris melted first, musk added, left a full year
Muḥammad b. al-ʿAbbās's ghāliya	Recorded by: al-Nuwayrī 12.58 Musk and ambergris: musk unquantified, dusted on at the end "as much as improves it"; ambergris unquantified Other aromatics: Indian aloeswood 10 dirhams ground three times with rosewater until dry; sukk of musk 15 dirhams Carrier: ambergris dissolved in ben; stirred with a wooden stick, never a palm rib or a fingernail; ground on the slab until it is like gum
Middle-grade ghāliya of Abū l-Ḥasan al-Miṣrī (identity uncertain; the Cairo editor's Ibn Riḍwān, d. c. AD 1068, is too late for al-Tamīmī to cite)	Recorded by: al-Tamīmī via al-Nuwayrī 12.59 Musk and ambergris: 3 : 1 Other aromatics: high-grade sukk of musk 2, Indian aloeswood 2 Carrier: bān al-ghāliya, three ounces; blue ambergris dissolved over a gentle fire
Al-Tamīmī's closing Sāhiriyya (10th c. AD)	Recorded by: al-Nuwayrī 12.59 Musk and ambergris: 1 : 1 Other aromatics: sukk 2, Indian aloeswood 3 Carrier: dissolved in ben, or applied dry with rosewater
Formula 47 of the Kīmiyāʾ al-ʿiṭr attributed to al-Kindī, for Khālid b. Yazīd, governor of Armenia	Recorded by: Garbers 1948, no. 47; King 2017, 289–90 Musk and ambergris: Combined musk-and-ambergris component to base: 1 to 2, 1 to 3 or 1 to 5 Other aromatics: base of pistachio and wild thyme censed with aloeswood; sukk; crushed aloeswood in the third grade Carrier: ben
Cairo Geniza pharmacy fragment, Arabic in Hebrew script with Latin and Spanish drug names (undated; the editor compares it to the Minhāj al-dukkān of c. AD 1260)	Recorded by: Gottheil 1935, 136–9, read directly Musk and ambergris: "ghāliya muskata, in Latin galia muscata": musk 9, ambergris and camphor 3; the Spanish galia: a dram each of musk and camphor, two of ambergris, at the end Other aromatics: first: Cambodian aloeswood 5, as tablets shaped like myrtle leaves; second: emblic myrobalan steeped in rosewater with citron peel, then aloeswood, rāmik, roses, cloves, spikenard, sandalwood, gum arabic Carrier: tragacanth in rosewater, "or dissolve the ambergris in a glass vessel with a little ben oil"

Five things follow from the table, and two of them correct what this house has said before.

Musk usually leads. The two ninth-century Baghdad witnesses, Ibn Māsawayh and al-Yaʿqūbī, both give two to one, and al-Zahrāwī's own recipe is two to one. But the same al-Zahrāwī passage ends by allowing the maker to put in musk equal to the ambergris or less than it, wa-in arāda an yajʿala l-misk mithl al-ʿanbar aw dūnahu faʿal (al-Nuwayrī 12.53); Ḥumayd al-Ṭūsī's was equal parts; and Zubayda's ran three of musk to ten of ambergris and was called an ambergris ghāliya for it (12.55). The name holds both. Al-Yaʿqūbī's judgement that equal parts "is not so strong" is his judgement, and a weight is not a smell (al-Nuwayrī 12.54; Yaʿqūbī, Works 1, fr. 8).

Ben is the principal carrier in many of these recipes, and one witness says why he wanted it plain. Al-Yaʿqūbī on the two ways of preparing ben: the Medinan way cooks it with aromatics, and that oil "is not fit for use in ghāliya perfumes because the odors of ambergris and musk are overpowered by the fragrance and sharpness of the aromatics. Kings do not use it except to anoint their hands in the winter. Women use it in their perfumes and veils" (Yaʿqūbī, Works 1, fr. 10, trans. Gordon et al.). That is one judgement about how much the carrier should contribute. The recipes preserve others.

The judgements differ. The Ḥajjājī recipe dissolves its ambergris in Kufan ben and Nishapur jasmine together, without saying how much of each. Zubayda's had a quarter of jasmine oil. The verses attributed to ʿAdī mix musk and ambergris with jasmine oil and name no ben. Al-Zahrāwī's instruction calls for duhn al-bān al-muṭayyab, scented ben, as the carrier itself. Jasmine oil, zanbaq, is the floral the recipes admit into the carrier, from those verses to the Abbasid court; in what proportion each admitted it, only Zubayda's entry says.

Aloeswood is older in the compound than the house previously said. An earlier working note treated oud as a later, lower addition, present only in the soldiers' grade of the Kīmiyāʾ al-ʿiṭr. The Firdaws of AD 850, the oldest dated text there is, has two parts of Indian aloeswood in its kings' ghāliya. The Ḥajjājī recipe, attributed to a governor who died in AD 714, has one part to ten of musk, and three of the four tenth-century recipes al-Nuwayrī preserves carry it. Oud is in the Firdaws readings and in the Ḥajjājiyya; the Umm Abān verses do not list it. The correction is recorded here.

Rose is present as water, and once as petals. Rosewater grinds the aloeswood in Muḥammad b. al-ʿAbbās's recipe and moistens al-Tamīmī's dry Sāhiriyya on the skin, and the Spanish galia lists roses among its ingredients. Rose oil as a carrier does not appear in any recipe examined, from the Umm Abān verses to al-Zahrāwī. Saffron appears in the Ḥajjājī recipe, in Hishām's, and in the economical grade of the Firdaws; sandalwood in Hishām's and in the Geniza's Spanish galia. Hishām's yellow one is so far from the definition, a saffron paste kneaded with boiled must and censed with nadd, that al-Tamīmī's inclusion of it under the heading is itself the evidence: by the tenth century ghāliya was the name of a family of pastes.

The other end of the family is the Kīmiyāʾ al-ʿiṭr, whose title Inoue reads as counterfeit rather than alchemy (Inoue 2017) and whose author King calls pseudo-al-Kindī. Its ghāliyas are mostly bases of cedar gum, wax, tar, pistachio or sesame, scented with as little musk as the buyer will accept (King 2017, 279). Formula 47 states the social ladder in so many words: the first grade, one part musk and ambergris to two of base, for the patricians of a country, the treasurer, the judge and the postmasters; the second, one to three with sukk, for the officers; the third, one to five with sukk and crushed aloeswood, for the soldiers, merchants "and other men" (King 2017, 289). Any claim that al-Kindī recorded a canon of the finest materials reads the book backwards. What formula 47 records is how much musk each rank was given. Inoue offers the reading of the title with care, and the collection holds oils, ointments and distilled waters beside its substitutes; the substitutes are one of its kinds, not the whole of it (Inoue 2017).

The far end of the family is in the Cairo Geniza. A pharmacist's manual, Arabic written in Hebrew letters and glossing its drugs in Latin and Spanish, gives two ghāliyas as numbered items in a section on pastilles, between a laxative and the rose troches. The first it calls ghāliya muskata, "which is the sukk perfumed with musk, in Latin galia muscata", nine parts of musk to three of ambergris and camphor and five of Cambodian aloeswood, bound with tragacanth in rosewater into tablets the shape of a myrtle leaf, "or, according to the opinion of others, dissolve the ambergris in a glass vessel with a little of the oil of ben"; it "strengthens the brain and the heart" and "betters the breath of the mouth". The second, the Spanish galia, is built on emblic myrobalan steeped three days in rosewater with citron peel and is for weak nerves and the digestion (Gottheil 1935, 136–9). The paste for a caliph's beard had become a tablet in a druggist's drawer, and the first of the two kept the ratio: musk three times the ambergris. Gallia muscata is an entry in the Latin antidotaria from the twelfth century onward; the route by which it reached Salerno and Montpellier is not traced here.

Al-Zahrāwī of Cordoba (d. c. AD 1013), whose Taṣrīf opens al-Nuwayrī's chapter, adds the conditions and a recipe of his own. The work is done at dawn before sunrise, for the evenness of the air, in spring if it can be, and never while the wind blows; musk is ground in a mortar of pure gold or on a slab of glass with a glass pestle; ambergris is dissolved in a shell of stone, or a vessel of black stone, glass, gold or gilded silver. His formula is an ounce of good musk, ground gently so that it does not burn, to half an ounce of good ambergris melted over the gentlest fire, onto which is dripped shayʾan min duhn al-bān al-muṭayyab, a little of the scented ben oil; the ambergris goes onto the musk once it is no longer hot, the two are worked together on the slab, scraped with a thin plate of gold and never with copper or iron, and the ghāliya is then thinned with ben to the consistency wanted (al-Nuwayrī 12.52–3, from al-Zahrāwī, read in the Cairo edition). Two to one again. And the ben is muṭayyab, scented. The passage does not say whether this was the overpowering Medinan preparation al-Yaʿqūbī objected to or a lighter one. Ibn Māsawayh adds the time: leave it a year. The Baghdad jars add the proof: the caliphs who made them were dead before the caliphs who opened them were born.

The word

The root is gh-l-w (غلو). Its sense is to go past a limit. The Quran uses it twice, both times to the People of the Book: يَا أَهْلَ الْكِتَابِ لَا تَغْلُوا فِي دِينِكُمْ (al-Nisāʾ, 4:171) and قُلْ يَا أَهْلَ الْكِتَابِ لَا تَغْلُوا فِي دِينِكُمْ غَيْرَ الْحَقِّ (al-Māʾida, 5:77): do not exceed the bounds in your religion. The same verb, applied to a price, is the ordinary Arabic for a market going up. Ibn Manẓūr gives both in one entry: ghalā fī l-dīn wa-l-amr, jāwaza ḥaddahu, and al-ghalāʾ naqīḍ al-rukhṣ, dearness is the opposite of cheapness (Lisān al-ʿArab, gh-l-w). Al-Qurṭubī, glossing 4:171, makes the link himself: al-ghuluww al-tajāwuz fī l-ḥadd, wa-minhu ghalā l-siʿr (Qurṭubī on 4:171).

Ghāliya is the feminine active participle. The costly one, or the one that has gone past what things are supposed to cost. The genus is named the same way: ṭīb (طيب), the general word for perfume, is the noun of ṭāba, to be good, an evaluation that became a name. Dharīra, the sprinkled one, is named for its use. This one is named for its price. The participle fixes no tense; Arabic lets the ism al-fāʿil refer to the past as readily as the present. What it fixes is the association. In Arabic the cost stays audible in the name, whether or not the speaker is pricing anything.

A participle is an adjective. This one was used as a noun for so long that the description hardened into a name, and the two functions never came apart. The association is available; it does not say what any maker put in or what any buyer paid. Nor does grammar decide how much a name may cover. Nadd is a noun, and al-Nuwayrī's chapter on the nudūd lists kind after kind (12.60); a noun can name a family as easily as a recipe. The record shows different preparations carrying the same name, some of them graded by ingredient and intended buyer. This paper reads the continuing association with cost as one thread through that variation, and not as proof that price decided every use of the name. Mukhallaṭ (مخلّط), the ordinary word for a blend in the Gulf trade, is also a participle used as a noun, and the comparison shows what ghāliya's grammar records. Mukhallaṭ describes what was done to the oil. Ghāliya describes what the oil did to the one who paid for it. The first is a process. The second is a verdict, and in the Muʿāwiya anecdotes the verdict is passed by the one who receives the perfume.

The word travelled further than the recipe. Other uses survive beside the compound, and none of them needs a formula.

A colour. In Persian poetry from the tenth century ghāliye is black and fragrant, and stands for the beloved's hair or the down on a cheek. Firdawsī: zi mushk-i siyah karda bar gul nigār, furūhishta bar ghāliye gūshvār (Dehkhodā, s.v. ghāliye). Manūchihrī's crow has its two wings hung with ghāliye. Ḥāfiẓ, ghazal 27: gar ghāliye khushbū shud dar gīsū-yi ū pīchīd, if ghāliya became fragrant it was by winding through her hair; and ghazal 436 opens on ān ghāliye-khaṭ, the one whose down is ghāliya-dark, with khaṭ punning on handwriting, the one image in the corpus that brings the black paste near to ink (Ḥāfiẓ, Ghazals 27, 436, 452). The Persian word is the Arabic one, and the preparation is still inside it. The conceit of ghazal 27 works only if ghāliya is a fragrant substance whose scent can be credited to the hair it touched, and Dehkhodā's entry opens with the costly sense, keeps the Muʿāwiya anecdote and gives the formulations. The poets added a colour to the word. They did not take the paste out of it.

A name. Ghāliya is a woman's given name across the Arabic-speaking world today, glossed in the name books as al-ghāliya al-thamīna al-qadr, the dear one, high in worth. The perfume is not in the gloss. The worth is.

A sound. In Ottoman Istanbul the compound was sold as galiye and kept in small vessels called galiyedan, and by the twentieth century the black paste that street sellers carried and men rubbed into their moustaches was called kalemis, which Yentürk identifies as the popular pronunciation of ghāliye-i misk, musk-ghāliya (Yentürk, #tarih). An Istanbul price register of AD 1640 lists galiye at roughly eight hundred times the price of incense water. The word had worn down to a sound, and the sound still named the paste.

A drug. In the Latin pharmacy of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries the compound is gallia muscata, and the Cairo Geniza preserves an explicit Arabic to Latin equivalence: an Arabic manual in Hebrew letters that names the tablet ghāliya muskata and glosses it "in Latin galia muscata" (Gottheil 1935, 136). The Latin kept the word and dropped the price; gallia is a name for a medicine, and nothing in it says expensive. One rival etymology should be recorded and dismissed. A Cairo editor of al-Nuwayrī derives the name from ghalā yaghlī, to boil, "because it is a mixture boiled together on the fire" (Nihāyat al-arab 12.19 n. 2). That is ghalā yaghlī, to boil, against ghalā yaghlū, to be dear. No early lexicon read here gives it, and the lexicon is where the argument is decided. The technique only agrees with it: al-Zahrāwī melts the ambergris over the gentlest fire and adds the musk once it is cool, and no recipe read here boils the compound.

So the word has several lives: a description of cost, a name for a compound, a figure for whatever is dark and fragrant, a woman's name, a worn Ottoman sound, and a drug name in a language that had lost the pun. The compound is only one of them. The preparations examined here differ and carry the same name. The word does not follow the recipe. What the sources show is the variation; the thread of cost through it is this paper's reading.

Who named it

Three stories of the naming, and a fourth voice that rejects all three.

The lexicographers say Sulaymān. Al-Jawharī (d. c. AD 1003): wa-l-ghāliya min al-ṭīb, yuqālu awwalu man sammāhā Sulaymān b. ʿAbd al-Malik. Ibn Manẓūr repeats it with the same yuqālu, it is said, and adds that one says taghallā bihā of a man who perfumes himself with it (al-Ṣiḥāḥ, gh-l-w; Lisān al-ʿArab, gh-l-w). Sulaymān reigned AD 715 to 717. Al-Azharī's Tahdhīb, a generation before al-Jawharī, has only al-ghāliya maʿrūfa, well known, and no attribution. The Sulaymān line enters the dictionaries with al-Jawharī and stays.

The awāʾil literature says Muʿāwiya. Abū Hilāl al-ʿAskarī (d. after AD 1005), in his book of firsts, gives a chapter headed awwalu man sammā l-ghāliya ghāliyatan Muʿāwiya ayḍan: Muʿāwiya smelt it on ʿAbd Allāh b. Jaʿfar, asked what it was, was told, and said innahā ghāliya, that is costly. ʿAbd Allāh b. Jaʿfar b. Abī Ṭālib was famous for open-handedness, and a story about cost sits naturally on him. Al-ʿAskarī then gives a second version in the same breath: that Muʿāwiya smelt it on Mālik b. Asmāʾ b. Khārija, and that Mālik's sister Hind was the first to make it (al-ʿAskarī, al-Awāʾil, 238). In this version the first maker is named: Hind, Mālik's sister, a woman of Kufa.

The Muʿāwiya story is repeated in modern Arabic writing with a footnote to al-Nuwayrī, and the footnote is real, though it is not al-Nuwayrī's. The Cairo edition of the Nihāyat al-arab carries, at 12.19 n. 2, an editor's note on the word ghawālī: first named by Sulaymān b. ʿAbd al-Malik, so called because it is a mixture boiled together on the fire (li-annahu akhlāṭ tughlā ʿalā l-nār), and then, quoted from ʿAbd al-Qādir al-Baghdādī (d. AD 1682), the Muʿāwiya version with the ben oil in it: ʿAbd Allāh b. Jaʿfar came in with the scent on him, was asked what his perfume was, said misk wa-ʿanbar jamaʿa baynahumā duhn bān, and Muʿāwiya said ghāliya, ay dhāt thaman ghālin. The editor adds a third claim from a modern pharmacopoeia, that Galen invented the ghawālī for a queen, which is recorded here only to be set aside. Al-Nuwayrī's own chapter on ghāliya (12.52–59), read in the printed edition for this paper, contains recipes and nothing else. So the witnesses discussed here are al-ʿAskarī in the eleventh century, al-Baghdādī in the seventeenth and a Cairo editor in the twentieth, and the ben oil enters with al-Baghdādī; whether any of the three drew on another is not shown. The boiling etymology in the same note is the one rival to the price reading found anywhere, and it has been dealt with above.

The fourth voice is al-Jāḥiẓ (d. AD 869), quoted by al-ʿAskarī against his own chapter. Al-Jāḥiẓ denied that anyone in Islam named the thing, because the word is in pre-Islamic poetry, and he cited two verses he attributed to ʿAdī: aṭyabu l-ṭībi ṭību Ummi Abān … misk bi-ʿanbarin masḥūq / khalaṭtuhu bi-zanbaqin wa-lubān, the best of perfume is Umm Abān's: musk with crushed ambergris, mixed with jasmine oil and lubān. The same chapter has already attached the verses to Mālik b. Asmāʾ and his sister Hind, so the attribution is contested inside the source. The transcription available does not show the word ghāliya inside the two lines, only the compound; whether the word stood in a line al-ʿAskarī did not copy cannot be settled from here. But the compound is described, musk and crushed ambergris in a scented oil, and ʿAdī b. Zayd of al-Ḥīra, if the verses are his, died around AD 600. Al-ʿAskarī closes with a report from al-Haytham, presumably al-Haytham b. ʿAdī (d. AD 822), that four things came to Quraysh and the Arabs from Abyssinia: ghāliya, the carrying of dead women on biers, the muṣḥaf with two covers, and a dower of four hundred dinars. He does not let it stand. Wa-lā aẓunnu l-Haytham yathbutu fī hādhā l-ḥadīth, I do not think al-Haytham holds firm in this report; the objection that follows asks when the Abyssinians were ever known for refinement of the kind ghāliya implies, asserts that maʿjūnāt al-ʿiṭr kulluhā ʿarabiyya, compound perfumes are all Arab, and on the next page adds that ghāliya, sāhiriyya, khalūq and lakhlakha are Arabic names and not arabised Persian ones (al-ʿAskarī, al-Awāʾil, 238 to 239).

That last report is the fact that resists the rest of this paper, and it arrives with its own rebuttal. King's judgement, on the absence of analogues anywhere in the Near East or Further Asia, is that nadd and ghāliya "seem to be genuinely Arabic inventions" (King 2017, 275). Her earlier argument for the same conclusion compares Arabic formulas with Indian and Tibetan ones, where musk is an enhancer at under one per cent, and finds the musk-heavy Arab compound unlike them (King 2011, 159–60). Abyssinia is not in that comparison. A ninth-century Kufan historian said the Arabs got ghāliya from the Ethiopians; the eleventh-century compiler who transmits him doubts him, and the objection he records is an assertion about Abyssinian taste, which is not evidence of where a preparation came from. Neither the report nor the objection settles it, and the Aksumite perfume record is not one this paper has read. The claim stays in the ledger open. It is listed here rather than buried because the house has once before overclaimed the originality of an Arab perfume and been corrected, and the correction was to name the substrate.

The four voices do not agree in the way a summary would like. The Muʿāwiya stories make cost the occasion of the naming: someone smells it, someone asks, someone says the word for expensive. The dictionaries give Sulaymān a name and no scene. Al-Jāḥiẓ disputes any naming in Islam at all. A tradition about an origin shows that the story circulated; it does not by itself establish that the event happened as told. What is clearer than the event is the association. The Muʿāwiya stories explain the name through cost; the later boiling explanation conflicts with them and with the lexicon. In the stories, the name is the price.

The record

Before Islam. Musk was worn in Arabia before the Quran was revealed. Ṭarafa b. al-ʿAbd, in the mid sixth century, describes noblemen departing with "the redolence of musk with them" (Dīwān, 59, via King 2017, 284). The verses on Umm Abān, given to ʿAdī by al-Jāḥiẓ and to Mālik's circle by al-ʿAskarī, describe the compound. Al-Haytham's report puts its arrival in Mecca with the Abyssinians, and his transmitter doubts him. That is the whole pre-Islamic record found. It makes the paste older than the religion it is best known through on one condition: that the attribution of the verses to ʿAdī holds.

The Hijaz, AD 680s. When ʿAbd Allāh b. al-Zubayr finished rebuilding the Kaʿba after the siege of AD 683, in al-Wāqidī's report preserved by al-Azraqī, he raised it to twenty-seven cubits, wa-khallaqa jawfahā wa-laṭṭakha judrātihā bi-l-misk ḥīna faragha minhā: he perfumed its interior with khalūq and smeared its walls with musk when he had finished (al-Azraqī, Akhbār Makka, ed. Ibn Duhaysh, bāb mā jāʾa fī bināʾ Ibn al-Zubayr al-Kaʿba; the editor grades the chain very weak). Khalūq inside, musk on the walls, and no ghāliya. Later narrators, according to Bursi, name the substance variously as ṭīb, ghāliya or khalūq (Bursi 2020). The earliest layer says musk. The variation is the finding: a seventh-century act, remembered by people who knew the word ghāliya and reached for it.

Damascus and Kufa, AD 660s to 740s. The naming, whichever caliph is credited. Al-Ḥajjāj, governor of Iraq (d. AD 714), lends his name to the recipe al-Tamīmī calls Ḥajjājiyya, and al-Tanūkhī records him distributing ghāliya to guests after a meal (al-Faraj baʿd al-shidda, 48, via King 2017, 290 n. 83). Hishām (r. AD 724–743) lends his to the yellow one. ʿAbd al-Malik b. Marwān (r. AD 685–705) is remembered in al-Ṭabarī's Firdaws for a sandalwood powder enhanced with musk that he "used at the time of sex" (Firdaws, 612, trans. King 2011, 157): the Umayyad court's musk is attested, even where its ghāliya is only attributed. Whether either man ever handled the formula that carries his name is not established by the sources examined here; what they do show is that by the tenth century these preparations were being recorded under Umayyad names, which tied them to an earlier court.

Baghdad, AD 750 to 950. These two centuries supply most of the court episodes used here. Al-Manṣūr (r. AD 754–775), remembered as a miser, ordered his family to dress in brocade and perfume themselves, and if he saw one of them fall short he said: yā fulān, mā arā wabīṣa l-ghāliyati fī liḥyatik, wa-innī la-arāhā talmaʿu fī liḥyati fulān, I do not see the gleam of ghāliya in your beard, and I see it flashing in the beard of so-and-so (al-Ṭabarī, Taʾrīkh, s.a. AH 158, notice on al-Manṣūr's character). Wabīṣ is a gleam. In this report the perfume is inspected as something visible on the beard.

In AH 160, AD 776 to 777, al-Mahdī (r. AD 775–785) came on pilgrimage and was told that the coverings heaped on the Kaʿba over the years had grown so heavy that its walls were in danger. He had every covering stripped off, thumma ḍammakhahā min khārijihā wa-dākhilihā bi-l-ghāliya wa-l-misk wa-l-ʿanbar, then drenched it outside and inside with ghāliya, musk and ambergris, and coated the whole exterior from bottom to top on every side, before three new coverings of Coptic cloth, Khurasani stuff and brocade went on; and he sat on the roof of the mosque by the Dār al-Nadwa watching it being coated (al-Azraqī, Akhbār Makka, ed. Ibn Duhaysh, bāb mā jāʾa fī tajrīd al-Kaʿba, on the authority of al-Azraqī's grandfather; the editor grades the chain sound). A second report in the same chapter, from a woman whose husband was there, has the men pouring the ghāliya out over the walls from outside on all four sides while the Kaʿba's servants held the frame the coverings hang on. And a century later, by one report, the colour was still there. Two transmitters of the text saw the Kaʿba stripped again at the end of Dhū l-Ḥijja AH 263, in AD 877. Isḥāq says its walls were the colour of grey ambergris, wa-aḥsabuhu min tilka l-ghāliya, and I think it was from that ghāliya; Abū Muḥammad al-Khuzāʿī saw the same colour and attributes it to that ghāliya without the hedge (ed. Ibn Duhaysh, 369 to 370). The interval is a hundred and three Hijri years, a hundred solar.

A pot offered to Hārūn al-Rashīd was praised by the navel of the Tibetan deer, the Aden coast, the Medinan oil-presser and the Basran compounder, three ingredients and the man who compounded them: "as for its musk, it is from the navels of the well-aged Tibetan animals, and as for its ambergris, it is from the ambergris of the Gulf of Aden, and as for its ben oil, it is from a certain al-Madanī, well known for the goodness of his work, and as for its compounding, it is by a man in Basra knowledgeable in its composition and skilled in compounding it" (al-Ṭabarī, ed. de Goeje, III.744–5, trans. King 2011, 153). The inventory taken at al-Amīn's accession in AD 809 listed a thousand pots of it beside a hundred thousand mithqāls each of musk and ambergris (Kitāb al-Hadāyā wa-l-tuḥaf, §302).

In AH 196, AD 811 to 812, during his war with al-Maʿmūn, al-Amīn received a large body of Ṭāhir's officers who had come over to him, gave them money, made them commanders, wa-ghallafa liḥāhum bi-l-ghāliya, and coated their beards with ghāliya, fa-summū bi-dhālika quwwāda l-ghāliya, so they were called the ghāliya generals (al-Ṭabarī, s.a. AH 196). The Maʿmūnī court produced the recipes al-Yaʿqūbī preserved. Al-Wāthiq (r. AD 842–847) made the jar his grand-nephew al-Muʿtaḍid would not disturb. Ibn Sayyār al-Warrāq's tenth-century manual for boon companions places it in the grooming sequence before attending court (Kitāb al-Ṭabīkh, 332, via King 2017, 286; not checked against Nasrallah's translation).

The same city produced the counter-current. Al-Washshāʾ (d. AD 936), describing the elegant men of Baghdad, says they avoid ghāliya "since it is the perfume of the youths or slave girls" (Muwashshā, 125–6, via King 2017, 285). The dandy declined what the caliph inspected beards for.

The devout, ninth century AD. Bishr al-Ḥāfī (d. AD 841), before his turning, found in the road a paper on which the name of God was written, trodden underfoot. Al-Qushayrī: fa-akhadhahā wa-shtarā bi-dirhamin kāna maʿahu ghāliyatan fa-ṭayyaba bihā l-kāghida wa-jaʿalahā fī shaqqi ḥāʾit, he took it, bought ghāliya with a dirham he had, perfumed the paper with it, and put it in a crack in a wall (al-Risāla, 1.48). Ibn al-Jawzī's version has him buy musk and rosewater instead, for five dāniqs (Ṣifat al-ṣafwa, 1.472), and Ibn Kathīr has the paper found in a bath furnace and the ghāliya bought from an ʿaṭṭār (al-Bidāya, via Islamweb). The versions differ over what he bought. They agree that a man with one coin spent it on perfume for a scrap of paper bearing the name of God. The Shīʿī tradition preserves ʿAlī al-Riḍā (d. AD 818) ordering four thousand dirhams' worth and defending it by the example of Joseph, who wore brocade "and that did not decrease his wisdom at all" (al-Kulaynī, Furūʿ al-Kāfī, 6.514, via King 2017, 345).

The physicians. Al-Kindī's epistle on music classes the scents: ghāliya with aloeswood "stimulates the faculties of regality and pride, together with amorousness, desire, and delight"; musk and ghāliya on their own are among the feminine scents (al-Kindī 1962, 106; Bursi and King 2024, 218). Ibn al-Jazzār of Qayrawan (d. c. AD 980): "Ghāliyas are compounded from hot substances, and therefore they are suitable for the aged, women, those with cold humors, and especially in the winter and in cold lands. They harm children, youths, and the hot humored" (Kitāb fī funūn al-ṭīb, 64, trans. King, in Lange and Bursi 2024). Al-Tanūkhī has a guest who hid a stolen mass of it under his turban and went blind until a physician washed it off with cold water, sandalwood, rosewater and camphor, and a young man who filled his navel with it and crossed winter in two shirts (Nishwār, via King 2017, 309 and King 2022, 41). Within that medicine, heat was a property of the paste, not a figure of speech.

Camphor is the fault line in the physicians' ghāliya. The Ḥajjājiyya admits it, the Geniza tablet has it, and Dehkhodā's Persian definition still carries it. Against that, Ibn Kaysān (d. AD 990) warns that camphor in ghāliya "spoils it", and if it must go in fixes the rate at one mithqāl to ten of ghāliya; Ibn al-Jazzār admits it in two of the sixteen ghāliyas in his chapter, a maktūma and a night-maker, and in the second at a single grain (King 2022, 41 to 42, citing Ibn Kaysān 1943, 209 and Ibn al-Jazzār 2007, 65, 70). Camphor was contested rather than excluded. Some recipes admit it; the physicians who wrote them down objected to it or rationed it.

Cordoba, Qayrawan, Cairo, AD 950 to 1500. Al-Zahrāwī wrote the conditions of manufacture into the nineteenth book of the Taṣrīf; al-Tamīmī of Jerusalem (d. AD 980) wrote the book of recipes that al-Nuwayrī copied; Ibn al-Jazzār wrote the pharmacology. In the twelfth century al-Shayzarī's manual for the market inspector devotes a chapter to the frauds of perfumers and treats ghāliya as a stock item, after musk, ambergris, camphor and saffron and before civet (Nihāyat al-rutba, via King 2017, 266, 267). The Geniza druggists had it as a tablet. By the time al-Nuwayrī finished the Nihāyat al-arab in Mamluk Cairo before his death in AD 1333, the chapter on ghāliya was an archive of a court practice three hundred years old. Al-Suyūṭī (d. AD 1505) wrote a maqāma in which musk, ambergris, saffron and civet plead their cases before a judge; the compounds, ghāliya among them, are the background against which the simples argue (al-Maqāma al-miskiyya; van Gelder in Lange and Bursi 2024, 191–2).

Persia, tenth to fourteenth century AD. The word passes into Persian and becomes a colour. Firdawsī, Manūchihrī, Niẓāmī and Ḥāfiẓ all use ghāliye for the dark and fragrant, as set out above. Dehkhodā still defines it as musk, ambergris, camphor and ben oil, so the recipe was not forgotten; the passages cited here draw on its colour and fragrance rather than on a recipe. The Persian scholarship on the compound itself, Anṣārī's Tārīkh-i ʿIṭr dar Īrān (68–9) and Newid's Aromata (195–202), is cited by King and was not read for this paper.

Istanbul, AD 1640 to 1900. The Ottoman price register of AD 1640 lists galiye at roughly eight hundred times the price of buhur suyu, incense water. It was kept in galiyedan, small covered vessels, and taken on the fingertip for the hair and eyebrows. Into the early twentieth century itinerant essence-sellers carried the black paste men rubbed into their moustaches under the name kalemis or kalemis yağı, which is ghāliye-i misk worn down by the street (Yentürk, #tarih; cf. Lange 2025, n. 4, citing Yentürk 2005, 71). More than eleven hundred years after al-Manṣūr it was still going on the face. What it cost by then, the register of AD 1640 cannot say.

Modern day, 1983 to 2026. Kanafani's fieldwork among Emirati women, published in 1983, found scented oils and incense everywhere and the unguents and scented powders gone; men's perfumery no longer used musk at all (Kanafani 1983, 41–51, via King 2017, 275 n. 21). The word survived the paste. The name remains in commercial use. An Omani supplier's list seen by the house in 2025 prices "HJ Hindi Ghaliya, 30 tola" among the dearest lines it carries; what such a list shows is the word in use as a price line, and nothing about the contents. The preparations in this paper differ in colour, proportion, carrier and use, and the name survives every one of those differences. What travelled with it is the association with cost. No one formula has held, and none is offered here.

What it carried

No single source accounts for all these uses. Read together, they fall into a small number of shapes.

Price made visible. The name makes the expense explicit. A man with ghāliya in his beard was wearing the musk road from Tibet and the ambergris coast of Aden on his face, and the Ṭabarī anecdote of Hārūn's pot, praised component by component and provenance by provenance, is the point made by a courtier who was then rebuked for talking like a salesman (al-Ṭabarī III.744–5). The gleam al-Manṣūr looked for was the gleam of expenditure.

Rank, and its transfer. The best of it was made for a caliph, kept in his treasury, and not shared. When it was shared the rank went with it: the officers al-Amīn bought in AH 196 were renamed after the perfume he put in their beards, and the name stuck. Al-Muqtadir sending a crystal bowl of ghāliya to a courtier who had missed a garden party in AD 924 is the same transaction in a kinder key (Kitāb al-Hadāyā wa-l-tuḥaf, §126, via King 2017, 292).

Generosity, and its opposite. The story of al-Wāthiq's jar judges three caliphs by one jar. Al-Jāḥiẓ put ghāliya in the Book of Misers: Abū Jaʿfar al-Ṭarasūsī, whose hosts had put it in his moustache and sabala, felt his upper lip itch and scratched it from the inside so as not to waste what was on the outside (al-Bukhalāʾ, 87). Perfume was the currency in which restraint and waste were measured, because it could not be got back once it had been given.

Heat, youth, and their limits. Ibn al-Jazzār's ghāliya is hot and harms the young; al-Washshāʾ's elegant men left it to youths and slave girls; al-Kindī's is regal with aloeswood and feminine without. King's reading is that musky perfumes belonged to youth and fertility, qualities a caliph needed to display, and that the ẓurafāʾ "sought to grow old gracefully" (King 2017, 285 n. 63). The paste sat on the line between what a ruler must show and what a gentleman need not.

The sacred. The reports set perfume beside acts of honour. Ibn al-Zubayr put khalūq inside the Kaʿba and musk on its walls; al-Mahdī had it drenched in ghāliya and sat on the mosque roof to watch; Bishr al-Ḥāfī's dirham went on a scrap bearing the name of God. They differ in scale and setting, and the reports do not say that the same paste, or the same motive, was in all three. What they share is the gesture: fragrance given to what is held sacred.

Time. Ibn Māsawayh's instruction gives a year. Al-Wāthiq's jar gives decades. The sources do not say whether age raised its price or made it better. They show that it stayed worth keeping, and that one caliph preferred a trace from the rim to disturbing what was left. Of all the meanings the word carried, this is the one that sits closest to the thing: a perfume that was kept.

Corrections

Hunayn is a cultural institution whose first expression is perfumery. It works from primary sources and from materials it has handled, and it publishes its corrections. This paper carries two, both against the house's own earlier statements.

Earlier pieces published by the house, among them "The Revival of Ghaliya: The Perfume of Princes, Polymaths and Prayers" (May 2025) and "Ghaliya Reimagined: Honour, Fragrance, and the Names That Endure" (June 2025), stated that the traditional ghāliya was a six-part formula of musk, oud, ambergris, rose, saffron and sandalwood, and attributed it to al-Kindī. No source read for this paper supports that formula. The Kīmiyāʾ al-ʿiṭr attributed to al-Kindī holds, beside its oils and distilled waters, a long run of substitutes and imitations, and its ghāliyas are graded by how little musk the buyer will accept. How the attribution arose has not been traced. Those pieces are superseded by this one.

An earlier working note placed oud only in the soldiers' grade, as a later and lower addition. It stands in the Firdaws of AD 850 at two parts in the kings' ghāliya, in the Ḥajjājī recipe at one part to ten of musk, and in three of the four tenth-century formulas al-Nuwayrī preserves. The correction is carried above.

Open accounts

The Abyssinian claim. Al-Haytham's report that ghāliya came to Quraysh from the Abyssinians, alongside biers, the bound muṣḥaf and the four-hundred-dinar dower, stands against King's judgement of an Arab invention and against al-ʿAskarī's doubt of al-Haytham and the assertion he records that compound perfumes are all Arab. The objection is a claim about Abyssinian taste, and no more evidence than the report. Nothing read here decides it. The Aksumite and South Arabian aromatic record has not been consulted. This is the account the paper leaves open on purpose.

The word in ʿAdī's verse. Al-Jāḥiẓ said the word is pre-Islamic and cited two lines; the lines as transmitted by al-ʿAskarī describe the compound and the transcription used here does not show the word in them. Either the word stood in a line not copied, or al-Jāḥiẓ's argument rested on the compound rather than the word. The Dīwān of ʿAdī b. Zayd was not opened.

The Muʿāwiya story in al-Zamakhsharī. A third version of the naming, in which ʿAbd Allāh b. Jaʿfar's bottle is priced rather than described and Muʿāwiya's word answers a sum, is cited in the trade to al-Zamakhsharī's Rabīʿ al-abrār. King cites the perfume chapter of that work at 2.213 to 216, in the Cairo edition of Diyāb and ʿAbd al-Tawwāb (1992 to 2001). In the course of review a reader located the passage in a digital transcription, Rabīʿ al-abrār 2.399 on lib.eshia.ir: ʿAbd Allāh b. Jaʿfar presents the bottle, Muʿāwiya asks what was spent on it, an amount is mentioned but not given, and the naming follows; the same page ties the Umm Abān verses to Mālik through Hind. The passage's presence in that transcription is confirmed. Its wording and pagination against the Cairo edition are not, and the house has not seen the page itself. If the two agree, al-Zamakhsharī (d. AD 1144) is an earlier witness to the Muʿāwiya version than al-Baghdādī, and the only one in which the caliph answers a price and not a compound.

The Minhāj al-dukkān. The pharmacist's manual of al-Kūhīn al-ʿAṭṭār (Cairo, AD 1260), which the Geniza editor compares to the fragment used above, was not opened. A ghāliya in it would be the Cairo pharmacy's version, and would add a dated Cairo witness to the pharmaceutical record. The Latin side was not opened either. The statement above that gallia muscata stands in the Latin antidotaria from the twelfth century rests on general reference and not on a text read for this paper.

Al-Azraqī's chains. Both reports on al-Mahdī were read in the Ibn Duhaysh edition. The editor grades the grandfather's report sound and the woman's report weak, and grades the Ibn al-Zubayr report, which comes through al-Wāqidī, very weak. The paper uses the sound chain for the fact of the coating and the weak one only for the manner of it.

Al-Wāthiq's jar. Two recensions of Ṣāfī's report survive. Al-Tanūkhī's (Margoliouth's translation, 154–6) says more than thirty jars and names al-Wāthiq's as the best; Ibn al-Jawzī's says sixty-odd and names no maker. The paper follows the earlier account, al-Tanūkhī's. Al-Tanūkhī adds a coda the paper does not use: that the palace's whole store of ghāliya, gums and ambergris went into the "mud-pie" of al-Muqtadir's mother, a popular story he himself reports as denied by those who knew the court.

Al-Zahrāwī and Garbers in the original. The Taṣrīf, maqāla 19, is still not held: the volume acquired for this paper under that title is the surgical maqāla 30 (the Osler copy), and has no ghāliya in it. King cites the perfume chapter in the second volume of the 1986 Frankfurt facsimile (al-Zahrāwī 1986, 2:20), which is the volume to find. Al-Zahrāwī's conditions and his own two-to-one recipe are known through al-Nuwayrī's borrowing (12.52 to 53), read in print; the cheaper versions King cites (2.47 to 49) are not. The Garbers edition of the Kīmiyāʾ al-ʿiṭr is an image scan without a text layer; formula 47 is known through King's translation and the house's own extraction table.

The hadith material. Reports about the Prophet's own perfuming are deliberately left out. The house does not cite hadith it has not verified against the printed collections, and none was verified for this paper.

The Persian and Ottoman scholarship. Anṣārī and Newid on the compound in Iran, and Yentürk's 2005 book behind the web article used here, were not read. The Persian material is the largest single gap in the record as told above.

The Firdaws readings. The three graded formulas are transcribed from a maghribī manuscript image (Arundel Or 41, f. 276) by the author of this paper and not from Siddiqi's edition. The quantities of ben in the kings' recipe, and one or two of the minor aromatics in the economical one, were not legible with confidence. The printed edition should be set beside them before any of the three is quoted as a formula.

Verification register

Every load-bearing claim was checked in one of three ways. Read directly: the source text itself was opened and the wording seen. Passage rechecked: a second pass, run separately from the drafting, located the passage online and reported its wording; this checks the reading and is not an independent witness. Via scholarship: the claim rests on a named scholar's citation and the primary text was not reached. Where a claim was read in a translation, on a manuscript image or in a catalogue transcription rather than in an edited text, the status says which. Nothing rated "via scholarship" is stated in the body more strongly than the scholar states it.

Claim	Source and status
More than thirty china jars; al-Wāthiq's the best; mould, neck smear, about thirty mithqāls; and the sixty-odd of the Ibn al-Jawzī recension	Source: al-Tanūkhī, Nishwār, trans. Margoliouth 1922, 154–6 (read on the house's copy); Ibn al-Jawzī, al-Muntaẓam, s.a. AH 295 (Islamweb text) Status: Al-Tanūkhī read in Margoliouth's translation; Ibn al-Jawzī's Arabic passage rechecked
Al-Tanūkhī's count, more than thirty, and al-Wāthiq as maker	Source: Margoliouth 1922, 154–6; King 2017, 287–8 Status: Read in Margoliouth's translation
Quran 4:171 and 5:77, lā taghlū fī dīnikum	Source: quran.com Status: Passage rechecked
Lisān al-ʿArab: ghalā fī l-dīn = jāwaza ḥaddahu; al-ghalāʾ naqīḍ al-rukhṣ; Sulaymān named it	Source: Islamweb Lisān text, gh-l-w Status: Passage rechecked
Al-Ṣiḥāḥ: yuqālu awwalu man sammāhā Sulaymān b. ʿAbd al-Malik	Source: almougem aggregation of al-Ṣiḥāḥ Status: Passage rechecked from an aggregator; printed edition not seen
Al-Qurṭubī on 4:171 linking ghuluww to ghalā l-siʿr	Source: quran.com tafsir text Status: Passage rechecked
Al-ʿAskarī, al-Awāʾil 238 to 239: Muʿāwiya and Ibn Jaʿfar; Mālik b. Asmāʾ and Hind; al-Jāḥiẓ's objection; the Umm Abān verses and their two attributions; al-Haytham's four Abyssinian things, al-ʿAskarī's doubt of him, and the rebuttal that compound perfumes are Arab	Source: shamela.ws/book/10529/227 Status: Read directly
Al-Nuwayrī 12.52–59: chapter is recipes only; Zahrāwī preface and his permission for musk equal to or less than ambergris (12.53); Ḥajjājiyya 10:10:1:1 in Kufan ben and Nishapur jasmine; Zubayda's three to ten (12.55); Hishām's yellow, with fifteen mithqāls of sukk in two stages and the musk at the end (12.57 to 58); Muḥammad b. al-ʿAbbās; Abū l-Ḥasan al-Miṣrī; al-Tamīmī's Sāhiriyya; the nudūd chapter (12.60)	Source: shamela.ws/book/10283/4025–4032 Status: Read directly, first on shamela.ws and then on the printed Cairo edition (Dār al-Kutub, vol. 12), from which the editor's note at 12.19, al-Zahrāwī's recipe at 12.53, the camphor in the Ḥajjājiyya, the ambergris in Hishām's, and the sukk in Muḥammad b. al-ʿAbbās's were taken
Al-Yaʿqūbī: 100 musk to 50 ambergris; equal parts weaker; Zubayda's quarter jasmine; Medinan ben not fit for ghāliya	Source: The Works of Ibn Wāḍiḥ al-Yaʿqūbī, vol. 1, frs. 8 and 10 (Brill 2018), read on the house's copy Status: Read directly
Ibn Māsawayh: 10 musk, 5 ambergris, melt the ambergris, leave a year	Source: Princeton catalogue explicit of MS Garrett 174B, read on the house's copy Status: Catalogue transcription of the explicit, the leaf itself not seen; the manuscript is a composite (al-Khāzin ff. 1–12, Ibn Māsawayh ff. 13–26) per Qosi and Karamati
Al-Manṣūr: mā arā wabīṣa l-ghāliya fī liḥyatik	Source: al-Ṭabarī, s.a. AH 158 (islamicbook.ws text) Status: Passage rechecked, Arabic seen
Al-Amīn, AH 196: ghallafa liḥāhum bi-l-ghāliya, quwwād al-ghāliya	Source: al-Ṭabarī, s.a. AH 196 (islamicbook.ws text) Status: Passage rechecked, Arabic seen
Hārūn's pot praised by provenance	Source: al-Ṭabarī III.744–5 Status: Read directly in King's 2011 translation (Islam and Tibet, 153); Firdaws al-ḥikma's four formulas and ʿAbd al-Malik's powder likewise via King 2011, 154 and 157
Ibn al-Zubayr: khalūq inside, musk on the walls	Source: al-Azraqī, ed. Ibn Duhaysh (Mecca 1424/2003), chapter on Ibn al-Zubayr's rebuilding; ed. Malḥas 1.216 Status: Read directly on the printed edition; also rechecked online
Al-Mahdī, AH 160: stripped the Kaʿba, drenched it inside and out with ghāliya, musk and ambergris, watched from the mosque roof; walls still ambergris-grey in AH 263	Source: al-Azraqī, ed. Ibn Duhaysh, chapter mā jāʾa fī tajrīd al-Kaʿba; Bursi 2020 Status: Read directly on the printed edition, Arabic seen
Bishr al-Ḥāfī: dirham, ghāliya, crack in a wall	Source: al-Qushayrī, al-Risāla, 1.48 (shamela) Status: Passage rechecked, Arabic seen
Ibn al-Jawzī's variant: musk and rosewater, five dāniqs	Source: Ṣifat al-ṣafwa 1.472 (shamela) Status: Passage rechecked
Ibn Kathīr's variant: bath furnace, ʿaṭṭār	Source: al-Bidāya via Islamweb fatwa 64318 Status: Passage rechecked at one remove
Al-Jāḥiẓ, al-Bukhalāʾ 87: al-Ṭarasūsī, moustache and sabala	Source: shamela.ws/book/10501/79 Status: Passage rechecked, Arabic seen
Al-Kindī's music epistle on ghāliya	Source: Bursi and King 2024, 218, read on the house's copy Status: Read directly (translation)
Ibn al-Jazzār on hot ghāliyas	Source: King in Lange and Bursi 2024, read on the house's copy Status: Read directly (translation)
King's definition, the imitation formulas, formula 47 grades, al-Washshāʾ, al-Shayzarī, Kanafani, ʿAlī al-Riḍā, the blindness and winter anecdotes, al-Warrāq, the 809 inventory, the 924 bowl	Source: King 2017, 75, 180, 266–7, 275–90, 292, 309, 345, read on the house's copy Status: Read directly in King; primary texts behind them not reached
King: nadd and ghāliya "genuinely Arabic inventions"	Source: King 2017, 275 Status: Read directly
Ḥāfiẓ 27, 436, 452; Firdawsī, Manūchihrī, Niẓāmī; Dehkhodā's definition	Source: ganjoor.net; vajehyab Dehkhodā Status: Passage rechecked
Ottoman galiye, galiyedan, kalemis, 1640 register	Source: Yentürk, tarihdergi.com; Lange 2025 n. 4 Status: Passage rechecked (web article); the 2005 book not seen
Al-Suyūṭī's maqāma of the four aromatics	Source: shamela.ws/book/28112/1; van Gelder 2024 Status: Passage rechecked
The name Ghāliya, "al-ghāliya al-thamīna al-qadr"	Source: al-adkar.com names Status: Passage rechecked
Kanafani 1983, AUB Press	Source: press.aub.edu.lb Status: Passage rechecked
Omani price list, "HJ Hindi Ghaliya 30 tola"	Source: Supplier list in the house's files, 2025 Status: Read directly
The three earlier Hunayn journal pieces and their six-part formula	Source: hunayn.co journal Status: Read directly
Camphor resisted: Ibn Kaysān's "spoils it" and one-in-ten rate; Ibn al-Jazzār's two of sixteen; al-Kindī 1962, 106 for the regality passage	Source: King 2022, 41–42 and 44 Status: Read directly (open access); Ibn Kaysān and Ibn al-Jazzār not seen in the original
Firdaws al-ḥikma f. 276: kings' ghāliya 3 musk, 1 ambergris, 1 sukk, 2 aloeswood in ben; a cheap aloeswood grade; an economical grade with saffron	Source: BL Arundel Or 41, image via the Qatar Digital Library Status: Manuscript image, the author's own transcription; provisional until set beside Siddiqi's edition; the ben quantities and the minor aromatics of the economical grade are not secure

One claim was removed from an earlier house dossier after this check: that al-Nuwayrī records the Muʿāwiya naming story. He does not.

References

Primary

• al-ʿAskarī, Abū Hilāl. al-Awāʾil. p. 238. https://shamela.ws/book/10529/227
• al-Azraqī, Abū l-Walīd. Akhbār Makka. Ed. ʿAbd al-Malik b. Duhaysh. Mecca: Maktabat al-Asadī, 1424/2003. Chapters on Ibn al-Zubayr's rebuilding and on the stripping of the Kaʿba. Read on the house's copy. Also ed. Rushdī Malḥas, 1.216, https://shamela.ws/book/9621/211
• Dehkhodā, ʿAlī Akbar. Lughatnāma, s.v. ghāliye. http://www.vajehyab.com/dehkhoda/غالیة
• Gottheil, Richard. 1935. "A Fragment on Pharmacy from the Cairo Genizah." Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society, 123–144. Read on the house's copy.
• Ḥāfiẓ. Dīvān, ghazals 27, 436, 452. https://ganjoor.net/hafez/ghazal/sh27 ; sh436 ; sh452
• Ibn al-Jawzī. al-Muntaẓam, s.a. AH 295, ṭaraf min sīrat al-Muqtadir. https://www.islamweb.net/ar/library/content/200/19730/
• Ibn al-Jawzī. Ṣifat al-ṣafwa. 1.472. https://shamela.ws/book/12031/647
• Ibn Kaysān, Sahlān. 1943. "Mukhtaṣar fī l-ṭīb. Abrégé sur les arômes par Sahlân ibn Kaissân." Edited by P. Sbath. Bulletin de l'Institut d'Égypte 26: 183–213. Cited from King 2022.
• Ibn Manẓūr. Lisān al-ʿArab, gh-l-w. https://islamweb.net/ar/library/content/122/5994/غلا
• Ibn Māsawayh, Yūḥannā. Kitāb Jawāhir al-ṭīb al-mufrada. Princeton University Library, Islamic Manuscripts, Garrett no. 174B, ff. 13a–26b. http://arks.princeton.edu/ark:/88435/g445cd200
• al-Jāḥiẓ. Kitāb al-Bukhalāʾ. p. 87. https://shamela.ws/book/10501/79
• al-Jawharī. al-Ṣiḥāḥ, gh-l-w. As aggregated at https://almougem.com
• al-Kindī. Epistle on the parts of music. Trans. Adam Bursi and Anya King, "Al-Kindī (d. after 256/870) on the Effects of Music, Colors, and Scents." In Lange and Bursi 2024, 209–219.
• al-Kindī. 1962. "Mūsīqā al-Kindī." In Muʾallafāt al-Kindī al-mūsīqiyya, edited by Zakariyyā Yūsuf, 93–110. Baghdad: Maṭbaʿat Shafīq. Cited from King 2022.
• [pseudo-]al-Kindī. Kitāb Kīmiyāʾ al-ʿiṭr wa-l-taṣʿīdāt. Ed. and trans. Karl Garbers as Buch über die Chemie des Parfüms und die Destillationen. Leipzig: Brockhaus, 1948. Formula 47.
• al-Nuwayrī, Shihāb al-Dīn. Nihāyat al-arab fī funūn al-adab. Vol. 12. Cairo: Dār al-Kutub. 12.19 (editor's note), 12.52–59. Read on the house's copy; also https://shamela.ws/book/10283/4025 to /4032
• al-Qurṭubī. al-Jāmiʿ li-aḥkām al-Qurʾān, on 4:171. https://quran.com/an-nisa/171/tafsirs/ar-tafseer-al-qurtubi
• al-Qushayrī. al-Risāla. 1.48. https://shamela.ws/book/9953/34
• al-Suyūṭī. al-Maqāma al-miskiyya. https://shamela.ws/book/28112/1
• al-Ṭabarī. Taʾrīkh al-rusul wa-l-mulūk. s.a. AH 158; s.a. AH 196. https://www.islamicbook.ws/tarekh/tarikh-alrsl-027.html ; -029.html
• al-Ṭabarī, ʿAlī b. Sahl Rabban. Firdaws al-ḥikma. British Library MS Arundel Or 41, f. 276, via the Qatar Digital Library. Read on the house's copy. Also ed. M. Z. Siddiqi, Berlin 1928, 611–16, not held.
• al-Tanūkhī, al-Muḥassin b. ʿAlī. Nishwār al-muḥāḍara. Trans. D. S. Margoliouth as The Table-Talk of a Mesopotamian Judge. London: Royal Asiatic Society, 1922. 154–156. Read on the house's copy.
• al-Yaʿqūbī. The Works of Ibn Wāḍiḥ al-Yaʿqūbī. Vol. 1. Ed. and trans. Matthew S. Gordon, Chase F. Robinson, Everett K. Rowson and Michael Fishbein. Leiden: Brill, 2018. Fragments 8, 10.
• The Quran, al-Nisāʾ 4:171; al-Māʾida 5:77. https://quran.com

Scholarship

• Bursi, Adam. 2020. "Scents of Space: Early Islamic Pilgrimage, Perfume, and Paradise." Arabica 67: 200–234.
• Inoue, Takatomo. 2017. "Al-Kindī's Attack on Alchemy and His Perfume Making." Orient 52: 79–92. The journal's online record gives 72–92; the printed article begins at 79.
• Kanafani, Aida S. 1983. Aesthetics and Ritual in the United Arab Emirates. Beirut: American University of Beirut.
• King, Anya. 2011. "Tibetan Musk and Medieval Arab Perfumery." In Islam and Tibet: Interactions along the Musk Routes, edited by Anna Akasoy, Charles Burnett and Ronit Yoeli-Tlalim, 145–161. Farnham: Ashgate. Read on the house's copy.
• King, Anya H. 2017. Scent from the Garden of Paradise: Musk and the Medieval Islamic World. Leiden: Brill.
• King, Anya. 2022. "Medieval Islamicate Aromatherapy: Medical Perspectives on Aromatics and Perfumes." The Senses and Society 17 (1): 37–51. https://doi.org/10.1080/17458927.2021.2020606. Read on the house's copy.
• King, Anya H. 2024. Translation of Ibn al-Jazzār, Kitāb fī funūn al-ṭīb, in Lange and Bursi 2024.
• Lange, Christian. 2025. "Thinking Through Smell: Theories of Olfaction in Early Modern Ottoman and Islamic Culture." Der Islam 102 (1): 168–210. DOI 10.1515/islam-2025-0006.
• Lange, Christian, and Adam Bursi, eds. 2024. Islamic Sensory History, Volume 2: 600–1500. Leiden: Brill.
• Qosi, Mohsen, and Younes Karamati. 1399 SH (2020). "A Survey on the Manuscripts of Kitāb al-Ṭīb by Muḥammad b. al-Ḥasan b. Ibrāhīm al-Khāzin." Tārīkh-i ʿIlm 18 (2): 9–39. DOI 10.22059/jihs.2021.316723.371612. https://jihs.ut.ac.ir/article_80014.html
• van Gelder, Geert Jan. 2024. Introduction to al-Suyūṭī's Maqāma al-miskiyya. In Lange and Bursi 2024, 191–192.
• Yentürk, Nejat. "Hoş kokularıyla baş döndüren medeniyet." #tarih. https://tarihdergi.com/hos-kokulariyla-bas-donduren-medeniyet/

Cited through King and not reached: al-Tanūkhī, al-Faraj baʿd al-shidda, and the Arabic of the Nishwār (the passage was read in D. S. Margoliouth's translation, The Table-Talk of a Mesopotamian Judge, London: Royal Asiatic Society, 1922, 154–6); al-Washshāʾ, al-Muwashshā; al-Shayzarī, Nihāyat al-rutba; al-Kulaynī, Furūʿ al-Kāfī; Kitāb al-Hadāyā wa-l-tuḥaf; Ibn Sayyār al-Warrāq, Kitāb al-Ṭabīkh; Ṭarafa, Dīwān; al-Zahrāwī, al-Taṣrīf, maqāla 19; Anṣārī, Tārīkh-i ʿIṭr dar Īrān; Newid, Aromata in der iranischen Kultur.