Stratification and outcome … the cosmetic trades … cosmetic receipts … graded holiness … the holy toilette … palace purity … the courtly toilette … public women

This is really the story of elluan ancient Mesopotamian word meaning a type of glittering, strikingly luminescent or beautiful cleanliness – a powerful, non-ascetic, pre-Christian, image of beauty that was entirely guilt-free. The cosmetic routine now called ‘pampering’ – baths, aromas, facials, manicures, pedicures, hair-styling and costuming, conducted in sensuous surroundings with or without groups of friends – emerged at both ends of Eurasia during the Bronze Age from c.4000 BCE, along with most of the necessary tools and raw materials. Cosmetics is the underbelly of personal hygiene – usually ignored, often much reviled, but even now forming an essential part of personal health-care and self-identity. The sensuous beauty of ellu turns out to be an integral part of the long history of royal court-culture, which ran more or less unbroken from this period through five millennia to the present day. Thanks to the Neolithic Revolution in technology and trade, Eurasia’s fertile sub-tropical river-valleys, coasts, islands and hinterlands had produced some tribal societies who had grown very rich indeed.