Ghaliya: Musk, Ambergris, and the Word That Became Civet

In Abbasid Iraq a pan of base warms over a low fire while the powdered plants and the perfumed oils go in one at a time. The animal materials usually wait until last, ground to powder. The musk is black grain, dried from a reddish-brown paste that sat in a pouch under the belly skin of a male musk deer, about twenty-five grams to the average pod, and it smells earthy and woody, or something like a baby's skin. The ambergris is a wax from a sperm whale's gut, yellowish-grey at its best. Off the heat the pan cools a little before the stirring, and what is left is thick enough to press into small discs and dry, or to keep in glass bottles.

Perfumers made several thick unguents this way, and ghaliya was the one built on musk and ambergris. Jalal al-Din al-Suyuti, the fifteenth-century scholar, gave it an essay of two leaves, and when its name crossed into Spanish it came to mean a third animal, the civet.

Boiled on the fire, or high-priced

The name has two stories, and Lane's Arabic lexicon keeps both: the compound was boiled together upon the fire, or the word meant high-priced. The recipe has more than two. Two modern scholars, Amar and Lev, set it beside nadd, an incense, as compounds made from camphor, ambergris and sandalwood. One of Lane's versions is musk, ambergris, camphor and oil of ben, the moringa oil perfumers prized because it smelled of almost nothing and was slow to go rancid, a base chosen to disappear.

Before the conquests, myrrh came north from Arabia and East Africa. Afterwards its importance declined, and musk seems to have taken its place. Of the twenty or so perfumes in common use across the medieval world, half appear in no earlier source, and most of the newcomers came from the vast region the sources call India. Camphor, ambergris and sandalwood were all unknown in the Middle East and the Mediterranean until the Muslim conquests.

By the Khurasan roads

Under the Abbasids, Tibetan musk came west in quantity along the Khurasan roads to Iraq, where it went into medicine and into perfumery, including oils, nadd incense and ghaliya.

In 851, with trade between the caliphs' Baghdad and India and China at its height, a merchants' account called the News of China and India ranked Tibetan musk above China's and noted that Tibet had men whose trade was going in search of it. The animals were thought to graze on spikenard, and that diet was one reason their musk was rated higher. The finest musk, merchants believed, was what the animals had rubbed onto stones in the mountains. A place name was already a grade, centuries before the trade names deer musk carries today.

Interest in Tibetan musk in the ninth and tenth centuries helped settle a small community of Iranian Muslims in Lhasa. At the other end of the road, in Arab kitchens, musk went into food, sweets above all, very often with rose-water.

In Russian Oud 2, Areej Le Doré uses the old pair the way those cooks used musk, a pinch in something sweet. The perfume is built around a chocolaty agarwood oil distilled in India by an old traditional method, with cacao beside it at the heart and a touch of natural deer musk and ambergris at the top. The first minutes are soft and faintly animal. Then the cacao and the oud close together until they read almost as one, and resins and cedar carry it down.

Two leaves in a library

"To have the smell of musk means you are an excellent person," the historian Anya King says, and a smell worth that much was worth faking. The most expensive substances were counterfeited on a large scale. Musk was stretched, a little of the real thing ground into a paste with other ingredients, and imitations of its smell began to be made. In the ninth century al-Kindi, the philosopher at the Abbasid court, devised several formulas for imitation musk.

Al-Suyuti, who died in 1505, kept his essay on ghaliya short. The copy in the US National Library of Medicine fills two leaves, made by the copyist al-Halwani in 1593, and the treatise has not been published in a modern translation or edition. Al-Kindi's Book of the Chemistry of Perfume and Distillations has been in German, with the Arabic text at the back, since Karl Garbers' translation came out in Leipzig in 1948.

Melted, not soaked

Ambergris can be left to soak. Areej Le Doré once let finely dusted Irish white ambergris steep in Mysore sandalwood from the year 2000, starting in May 2022, and the result smelled slightly animalic, powdery and a little salty. Medieval perfumers used heat. They melted the whale's ambergris, refined it, pressed it into pellets called shamama to burn and sweeten the air, and set it into wax candles with aloeswood and musk.

Elixir Attar was founded in 2019 by a perfumer who grew up among incense and oud in 1980s Abu Dhabi, and its AlGhaliya takes both routes at once. Siberian, Nepalese and Kashmiri musk are macerated in aged Mysore sandalwood. Two kinds of ambergris are melted in, a white from New Zealand and a black. The musk and ambergris shift from batch to batch, and the newest version adds an ancient Celtic white ambergris that leaves the smell alone and raises only the value: high-priced, as one story of the name has it.

The Bulgare Fleuri half is a run of flower enfleurages, lilac, freesia, Bulgarian rose, gardenia and tuberose among them. It opens like cut flowers standing in water, salt already underneath, and gardenia and tuberose give the middle a creamy, white-petalled weight. The Sri Lankan oud belongs to the Animalique half and runs up through the flowers as a dry woody line. The drydown is where the ambergris and musk settle, powdery and close to the skin over the old sandalwood.

The Spanish word for civet

On its way into Castilian, apparently in the fourteenth century, the word took the Arabic article onto its front and became algalia. In Spanish today algalia is civet: an oily substance with the consistency of honey, white turning brown, strong-smelling and acrid to the taste, taken from a pouch near the anus of the animal Spanish calls the gato de algalia. English found its own civet down another road, from the Arabic zabad.

Civet had a place in the old unguents too, usually added at the end with the musk and the ambergris. Because musk was scarce, civet and castoreum were used in its place, though neither had the prestige of real musk. In Spanish, the name that may once have meant high-priced now belongs to the stand-in.

War and Peace 3 puts the whole medieval cast into one ingredient: a co-absolute of vintage deer musk, ambergris, castoreum and vintage civet made by Russian Adam, set with Indian oud, oakmoss, vetiver and amber resin oil. Further down the same list sits synthetic civet, so the real paste and its imitation share one formula. It opens on 35-million-year-old amber resin, a fossil tree resin with nothing to do with ambergris, balsamic and faintly smoky. Taif rose and Rose Alba pass through with orris and a cocoa-dark patchouli, and as it settles the civet and the oakmoss come up under a musky, suede-soft skin.

Algalia is also the Spanish for ambrette, a mallow from India whose seeds smell of musk, and the plant's other name there, abelmosco, comes from the Arabic habbu l-musk, musk seed. A word for musk cooked in a pan over the fire ends on a seed that only smells of it.

Frequently asked questions

What is ghaliya?

A thick perfume paste of the medieval Islamic world, built on musk and ambergris. The recipe varied: Lane's Arabic-English Lexicon also gives musk boiled with other perfumes, or musk, ambergris, camphor and oil of ben.

Why is it called ghaliya?

Lane's Arabic-English Lexicon records two explanations: the compound was boiled together upon the fire, or the word means high-priced.

Has al-Suyuti's treatise on ghaliya been translated?

No. It has not been published in a modern translation or edition. The US National Library of Medicine holds a two-leaf copy made in 1593.

What does algalia mean in Spanish?

Algalia comes from the Arabic ghaliya and entered Castilian with the Arabic article attached, apparently in the fourteenth century. Today it means civet, the honey-thick paste used in perfumery, and it also names ambrette, the musk-seed plant. The English word civet comes from a different Arabic word, zabad.