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06/03/2021
Parfümlein
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Parfümlein
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More delicious than all balm scents
That the Sabaeans were considered a rich people is not surprising: they traded in frankincense and myrrh; precious items worthy of a king, as the story of the newborn king in Bethlehem shows. Frankincense and myrrh, dissolved in oil, are in fact the most valuable substances of antiquity. Those who mastered the frankincense trade - and the Sabaeans succeeded in this great coup in the 7th century B.C. - could no longer complain about financial worries. The Sabaeans are based in what is now Yemen, and for thirty years archaeologists have been digging there for a palace that will prove not only the wealth of the Arab people but also their legendary queen: Malkat Šĕva in Hebrew, Makeda in Ethiopian, Bilkîs or Balkîs (which is again Hebrew) in Islamic tradition.
Balkîs is an extraordinary woman. So little is known about her - and yet she appears in so many writings: the Old Testament, the Qur'an, and Ethiopian legends. What is puzzling about her is that almost nowhere does she become identifiable by a name - only the Ethiopian scriptures refer to her specifically as "Makeda." All other names - and many have been attributed to her - are traditionally used, but are hardly historically verifiable, as is her never-found palace.
Her meeting with the famous King Solomon is also enigmatic: she comes to him with precious gifts, she asks him questions, complicated, treacherous riddles. And yet, if she really did meet him, she was not the Queen of Sheba. For the kingdom of Sheba did not exist, or at least: did not flourish, until two centuries after Solomon.
Now at first this is not surprising. Mixing historical figures, combining them, linking their deeds and thus providing them with a new chronology is a pattern we already know from the Nibelungenlied; it served the mostly oral memory of our ancestors to bring extraordinary characters and central human conflicts into a logical context and thus to preserve them in order to recognize behavioral patterns, conflict solutions, human failures and to transmit them to later generations. As little as Attila, Brunhild and Siegfried could have known each other, so little did Solomon and the Queen of Sheba. It is interesting, then, to see what stereotyped behaviors, what faults, what conspicuousness their fictional meeting was intended to illuminate.
Solomon is not only wise on his throne of ivory. And filthy rich. He is, above all, a womanizer. He is said to have had 700 wives and 300 concubines - this sheds significant light on Balkîs, the eponym of our perfume. She must have been beautiful, extraordinarily beautiful, beguilingly beautiful - and also very, very rich. It is to his court that she goes in the story of the Old Testament, in the First Book of Kings, to convince herself that Solomon is really the one whose picture is drawn in the tales. To do him the honor he deserves with her state visit, she brings gifts: Precious stones, gold and the precious balsamic oils of frankincense and myrrh. He did not need these gifts, for it is said in the First Book of Kings that his tableware was made entirely of gold. However, he was probably attracted by the beauty of her gift, and so he agreed to answer the questions that the queen asked him in order to test his intelligence. The question about water, which comes neither from heaven nor from earth and yet is able to quench every thirst, has been handed down from Islam. Correctly Solomon recognizes: it is the sweet sweat of the horse. He passes the test this intelligent woman puts him to. The lesson, then, is probably that two equals in rank and name, in money and property, cannot value each other until the spirit of the one inspires the other.
However, if Balkîs, the Queen of Sheba, is not the biblical woman whom Solomon met, then who was she? She was then probably queen, but not of Sheba; here then the Bible erred as it so often does. All roads to establish the identity of Solomon's intriguing visitor lead to Ethiopia: to Makeda, the fabled black queen. She may have known Solomon - Flavius Josephus, the Roman historian, can at least tell us that Solomon received an Ethiopian queen. She, too, was presumably wealthy. And probably very beautiful, too.
Makeda, Balkîs meets us as an enigma. As an enigmatic woman who fascinated equally the Hebrew, the Ethiopian and the Islamic cultures. When Céline Ellena characterizes her as "sublime," she hits on the impression that the Queen of Sheba creates in European, Oriental, and even American culture, which tried its hand at a big-screen epic with Gina Lollobrigida: she doesn't let anyone see her cards. She does not allow herself to be equated with other women. She doesn't let herself be dominated. She emancipates herself from the man's monopoly on power and intelligence and opposes him as his equal. At the same time, she makes use of the weapons that man does not have, and also uses her beauty sublimely: Double is better.
Sublime Balkiss is a fragrance that perfectly encapsulates this female character: it is utterly enigmatic. I don't know of a second scent that I find so difficult to categorize, and the countless, completely different statements prove this. It's a fragrance that starts out oddly round, velvety and fruity. The strange, the alien, lies in the violet leaf, which opens a dark depth whose hidden reason can only be guessed at. Present is the currant, but it is so interwoven with the individual flowers and these are so difficult to separate from each other that a fresh, minimally fruity, slightly green, tart scent emerges that is literally "niche". It doesn't compare to any other perfume I know, and it's obviously polarizing. You love it or you despise it - but do you even understand it? Isn't it much more mysterious than it seems at first glance? Feminine it is, and strong at the same time, with a convincing sillage and a fairly long longevity of about four hours. Although there are florals and fruit and even cocoa involved, it never courts foreign favors or uses sophisticated feminine tricks: it's not sexy. But mysterious. Not sweet. But feminine. Not flowery. But in depth, he's hiding something. It's confident. And the patchouli I so disliked gives its tart green note an earthiness that couldn't be more harmonious. It's a queen scent. If the Queen of Sheba aka Ethiopia, the enigmatic Balkîs, hadn't intrigued Solomon with this fragrance - she wouldn't have made it with any. Perhaps he dedicated these words from his Song of Songs to the beautiful Ethiopian and her balsamic-scented gifts:
"How beautiful is your love, / my sister bride; how much sweeter is your love than wine, / the fragrance of your ointments more delicious than all the perfumes of balm." (Hld 4:10)
Balkîs is an extraordinary woman. So little is known about her - and yet she appears in so many writings: the Old Testament, the Qur'an, and Ethiopian legends. What is puzzling about her is that almost nowhere does she become identifiable by a name - only the Ethiopian scriptures refer to her specifically as "Makeda." All other names - and many have been attributed to her - are traditionally used, but are hardly historically verifiable, as is her never-found palace.
Her meeting with the famous King Solomon is also enigmatic: she comes to him with precious gifts, she asks him questions, complicated, treacherous riddles. And yet, if she really did meet him, she was not the Queen of Sheba. For the kingdom of Sheba did not exist, or at least: did not flourish, until two centuries after Solomon.
Now at first this is not surprising. Mixing historical figures, combining them, linking their deeds and thus providing them with a new chronology is a pattern we already know from the Nibelungenlied; it served the mostly oral memory of our ancestors to bring extraordinary characters and central human conflicts into a logical context and thus to preserve them in order to recognize behavioral patterns, conflict solutions, human failures and to transmit them to later generations. As little as Attila, Brunhild and Siegfried could have known each other, so little did Solomon and the Queen of Sheba. It is interesting, then, to see what stereotyped behaviors, what faults, what conspicuousness their fictional meeting was intended to illuminate.
Solomon is not only wise on his throne of ivory. And filthy rich. He is, above all, a womanizer. He is said to have had 700 wives and 300 concubines - this sheds significant light on Balkîs, the eponym of our perfume. She must have been beautiful, extraordinarily beautiful, beguilingly beautiful - and also very, very rich. It is to his court that she goes in the story of the Old Testament, in the First Book of Kings, to convince herself that Solomon is really the one whose picture is drawn in the tales. To do him the honor he deserves with her state visit, she brings gifts: Precious stones, gold and the precious balsamic oils of frankincense and myrrh. He did not need these gifts, for it is said in the First Book of Kings that his tableware was made entirely of gold. However, he was probably attracted by the beauty of her gift, and so he agreed to answer the questions that the queen asked him in order to test his intelligence. The question about water, which comes neither from heaven nor from earth and yet is able to quench every thirst, has been handed down from Islam. Correctly Solomon recognizes: it is the sweet sweat of the horse. He passes the test this intelligent woman puts him to. The lesson, then, is probably that two equals in rank and name, in money and property, cannot value each other until the spirit of the one inspires the other.
However, if Balkîs, the Queen of Sheba, is not the biblical woman whom Solomon met, then who was she? She was then probably queen, but not of Sheba; here then the Bible erred as it so often does. All roads to establish the identity of Solomon's intriguing visitor lead to Ethiopia: to Makeda, the fabled black queen. She may have known Solomon - Flavius Josephus, the Roman historian, can at least tell us that Solomon received an Ethiopian queen. She, too, was presumably wealthy. And probably very beautiful, too.
Makeda, Balkîs meets us as an enigma. As an enigmatic woman who fascinated equally the Hebrew, the Ethiopian and the Islamic cultures. When Céline Ellena characterizes her as "sublime," she hits on the impression that the Queen of Sheba creates in European, Oriental, and even American culture, which tried its hand at a big-screen epic with Gina Lollobrigida: she doesn't let anyone see her cards. She does not allow herself to be equated with other women. She doesn't let herself be dominated. She emancipates herself from the man's monopoly on power and intelligence and opposes him as his equal. At the same time, she makes use of the weapons that man does not have, and also uses her beauty sublimely: Double is better.
Sublime Balkiss is a fragrance that perfectly encapsulates this female character: it is utterly enigmatic. I don't know of a second scent that I find so difficult to categorize, and the countless, completely different statements prove this. It's a fragrance that starts out oddly round, velvety and fruity. The strange, the alien, lies in the violet leaf, which opens a dark depth whose hidden reason can only be guessed at. Present is the currant, but it is so interwoven with the individual flowers and these are so difficult to separate from each other that a fresh, minimally fruity, slightly green, tart scent emerges that is literally "niche". It doesn't compare to any other perfume I know, and it's obviously polarizing. You love it or you despise it - but do you even understand it? Isn't it much more mysterious than it seems at first glance? Feminine it is, and strong at the same time, with a convincing sillage and a fairly long longevity of about four hours. Although there are florals and fruit and even cocoa involved, it never courts foreign favors or uses sophisticated feminine tricks: it's not sexy. But mysterious. Not sweet. But feminine. Not flowery. But in depth, he's hiding something. It's confident. And the patchouli I so disliked gives its tart green note an earthiness that couldn't be more harmonious. It's a queen scent. If the Queen of Sheba aka Ethiopia, the enigmatic Balkîs, hadn't intrigued Solomon with this fragrance - she wouldn't have made it with any. Perhaps he dedicated these words from his Song of Songs to the beautiful Ethiopian and her balsamic-scented gifts:
"How beautiful is your love, / my sister bride; how much sweeter is your love than wine, / the fragrance of your ointments more delicious than all the perfumes of balm." (Hld 4:10)
13 Replies
YasSharov
