ana kâšim lū šulmu!

May there be well-being to you! (IN ANCIENT AKKADIAN)

Welcome to the website for Marlen Elliot Harrison’s historical fiction novel, The Perfumer of Ashur, and proposed immersive exhibit, “The Tappūtī Project.”

Thirteenth-century BCE Assyria. A girl with an extraordinary gift for fragrance is about to discover how dangerous it can be to defy the world that controls her.

Tapputi dreams of becoming a master perfumer, creating sacred oils and fragrances for the gods and kings of Ashur. But when a violent encounter with a powerful merchant ends in blood, she is condemned to an ordeal that will cost her far more than she imagined.

Grieving, disgraced, and determined to reclaim the future she has lost, Tapputi turns to the only language she has always trusted: perfume. Yet talent is not enough. Her refusal to obey tradition threatens her closest relationships and destroys her first chance at the palace, forcing her into the temple workshops where an exacting old priest teaches her that inspiration without discipline can be as dangerous as ignorance.

There, among cedar, myrtle, oils, fire, and the fragments of knowledge left by her vanished parents, Tapputi begins experimenting with a radical new way of capturing scent. What she creates could transform the perfumer’s art. It could also carry her directly into the orbit of a king.

And in Assyria, the attention of a king can be as dangerous as his anger.

Inspired by the historical Tapputi-belatekallim, one of the world’s earliest known named perfumers, The Perfumer of Ashur is an epic historical novel of ambition, grief, desire, discovery, and the perilous price of becoming a woman whose knowledge can no longer be ignored.

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