The History of Chamomile: What Sources Do and Do Not Show

Most chamomile histories open with Egypt, the sun god Ra and the Ebers Papyrus. We could not trace that story to any source we were able to read, so this timeline is built only from texts and records we fetched. What survives checking is older than the aromatherapy trade and quite different from it: a low-growing plant in Greek medical texts, an apple-smell etymology that scholars still argue about, and a blue molecule named in 1863.

Roman Chamomile Essential Oil bottle

Roman Chamomile Essential Oil

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What we could not trace

The 2010 review in Molecular Medicine Reports by Srivastava, Shankar and Gupta, which surveys chamomile's traditional uses, calls it "one of the most ancient medicinal herbs known to mankind" and says herbs date back "at least 5000 years." Those lines cite textbooks and herbal references, not named ancient sources, and the paper has no mention of Egypt, Ra, Dioscorides, Pliny or Galen. The 2023 "Herbs in History: Chamomile" article for the American Herbal Products Association, written by the historians of ancient medicine Alain Touwaide and Emanuela Appetiti, starts its record with Greek sources and does not mention Egypt or Ra either. Our own searches for chamomile in the Ebers Papyrus returned nothing that connected the two. That is an absence in what we read, not proof the claim is false; it means we will not repeat it.

The Greek record: a low plant, with dated mentions

The AHPA article gives these anchors, which we report as the authors do:

These are dates for texts mentioning the plant, not for any technique we would recognise today. None of them involves essential oil.

Pliny, read in translation

We read Pliny the Elder's passage in the 1855 Bostock and Riley translation on the Perseus Digital Library, where it is Book 22, chapter 26 (the AHPA article cites the same passage as 22.53 to 54, in the numbering modern editions use; that they are the same passage is our inference from the matching content). Pliny says the anthemis "has been highly extolled by Asclepiades," that some call it "chamaemelon" "because it has a smell like that of an apple," and that it has three varieties differing in flower, white, yellow or purple, none above a palm in height. It was gathered in spring for chaplets, and physicians pounded leaves, flowers and root into lozenges. The uses he lists run from serpent stings to bladder calculi, and the purple kind is called most effective for the latter. We report these as what a first-century author wrote, not as anything a modern reader should rely on.

The translators' footnotes add a disagreement worth noting. Fée, following Sibthorp, takes the "chamaemelon" to be Matricaria chamomilla, the common camomile, and ties the other names to different Anthemis species; Sprengel, the note says, differs. So Pliny's chamaemelon may be what we call German chamomile, and his other "anthemis" names may be neighbouring plants. The name on our Roman oil bottle, Anthemis nobilis, shares the old genus word, but that does not show his plant and our oil's plant are the same.

Where the name "ground apple" gets complicated

Popular histories say chamomile means "ground apple." Pliny gives the apple-smell reading. The AHPA authors argue that Theophrastus's classification points to something else: a low-growing plant or fruit, noting that melon generally means fruit, not apple specifically. The Latin genus name Matricaria, they say, comes from matrix, womb, reflecting gynecological use. The etymology is a named dispute, not a settled fact, and the apple smell is real either way: our Roman oil's aroma is described on its page as sweet, apple-like and herbaceous.

From herbal to modern monographs

The AHPA article continues with the Herbarium Apulei (misattributed to Apuleius, probably compiled in the fourth century), a thirteenth-century southern Italian Tractatus de herbis and fourteenth-century English treatises. It also notes the Old English Nine Herbs Charm, possibly tenth century, which it presents as folk and magical, not medical. The practical picture, reasoning from these entries and from Pliny: the dated record is of plant material taken or applied in preparations such as lozenges and drinks, with a second strand in charms, and none of it describes a distilled oil.

The modern endpoint is regulatory. The European Medicines Agency's monograph for chamomile flower, published 5 April 2016, rests on traditional use and not well-established use. It requires at least 30 years of documented use, including 15 in the EU, and notes that clinical-trial evidence is insufficient. The forms it covers are teas, infusions, liquids and semi-solids. The agency's chamomile oil summary covers a bath additive for adults and adolescents over 12. Neither names diffusing or aromatherapy massage. That gap is the useful history lesson: modern aromatherapy use is a different thing from the old herbal use, and a long record of tea and poultice does not transfer automatically to a concentrated oil.

The blue molecule: a nineteenth-century name

The history of the oil's blue colour is better documented. An abstract in Chimia, "Die Geburt einer Struktur", records that in 1863 Septimus Piesse proposed the name azulene, from "azure blue," for the blue substance in certain distilled oil fractions (chamomile, yarrow and wormwood), after John Hall Gladstone first characterised it by its Fraunhofer spectrum. It then took 73 more years of work before Alexander Pfau and Placidus Plattner, in a 1936 Helvetica Chimica Acta paper, established the structures of vetivazulene and guaiazulene and the first synthesis of the parent compound. A 2026 review in Nutrients (Such et al.) adds that chamazulene is formed from matricin during steam distillation and is absent in the fresh plant. So the blue in a German chamomile oil is a product of the still, a point our blue-colour explainer develops. We could not source a date for the first distillation of chamomile oil, so we give none.

Who should skip this, and limits

This is a history, not a guide to use. Pliny's remedies and the traditional uses in the monographs are reports of what people did or what regulators accept on tradition, not evidence that an oil does anything. For skin, allergy or pregnancy questions, see a dermatologist, allergist, or OB-GYN or midwife. The EMA notes allergic reactions to chamomile and says people allergic to Asteraceae plants should not use it. If you want to go further into the plants and where the oil comes from, our complete guide has a short history section this essay goes deeper than, and the origins article picks up where the geography begins.

Our German and Roman oils are distilled products sold undiluted, a modern form of a plant whose written record starts with a low-growing herb and a physician's list of lozenges.

Roman Chamomile Essential Oil bottle

Roman Chamomile Essential Oil

Roman Chamomile Essential Oil from our own shop, in sizes from 0.5 oz to bulk.

From $32.99

Shop Now →

Sources & Further Reading