Discover the Aromas of Ancient Egyptian Mummies, From Orange Peels to Pine to Incense | Smithsonian

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/discover-the-aromas-of-ancient-egyptian-mummies-from-orange-peels-to-pine-to-incense-180986035/

Discover the Aromas of Ancient Egyptian Mummies, From Orange Peels to Pine to Incense

A new, first-of-its-kind analysis of the scents of nine mummies detected woody, spicy, herbal and rancid notes, among other odors

Sarah Everts

Author, The Joy of Sweat: The Strange Science of Perspiration

Few visitors wandering through the mummy galleries at the Egyptian Museum in Cairo have the opportunity—or perhaps the inclination—to smell the aromas wafting off the gilded sarcophagi and elaborately wrapped bodies of ancient Egyptian elites on display in glass cases.

For those who are curious, however, a new study published in the Journal of the American Chemical Society has captured and analyzed the scents of nine human mummies in the museum's collections, detecting woody, spicy and herbal notes. Many of the mummies also emanated hints of smoke, mold, flowers and dust, among other odors.

"It was a very special experience—really incredible," says first author Emma Paolin, a chemist at the University of Ljubljana in Slovenia.

The international research effort is the first systematic odor and chemical analysis of multiple Egyptian mummies from a range of time periods. The remains span the New Kingdom—the height of mummification practice and skill, in the second millennium B.C.E.—to the late Roman period in the third and fourth centuries C.E., when mummification was in decline.

Emma Paolin (left) and Abdelrazek Elnaggar (right) take a sample of the smell of an ancient sarcophagus. Cecilia Bembibre

"It was absolutely mind-boggling that the nine mummies smell so differently," says Matija Strlič, also a chemist at the University of Ljubljana. Strlič, who led the research alongside Ali Abdelhalim, general director of the Egyptian Museum in Cairo and an archaeologist at Egypt's Ain Shams University, explains that the odors provide hints about the life stories of these mummies, from when they were first prepared to the conservation treatments they underwent after excavation.

The idea of studying mummy odors came to Strlič a few years ago, when he was touring a conservation laboratory and had an opportunity to sniff a mummified body that had recently arrived from an excavation. "It had almost a cosmetic smell—pleasantly sweet and herbal," Strlič recalls. "I had heard anecdotes from conservators who said that many mummies smell pleasant and sweet, if they are in a good state of conservation, or rancid, if they are deteriorating. But this was the first time I experienced it myself."

Scholars of ancient cultures once overlooked smell in their chronicles of the past. But a surge of recent research on odor history has sought to better understand the sensory lives of our predecessors. "We know from literary sources of ancient Egypt that a good smell was something extremely important to this culture—and a good-smelling mummy especially so," says Philipp Stockhammer, an archaeologist at the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich who wasn't involved in the new research.

"I love the idea … because it's sniffing out information of the past, which is amazing," says Barbara Huber, an archaeological chemist at the Max Planck Institute of Geoanthropology in Germany who also wasn't involved in the study.

Emma Paolin sets up active air sampling with sorbent tubes and pumps. Abdelrazek Elnaggar

---

Mummification was a sacred—and fragrant—practice for ushering ancient Egyptian elite into the afterlife. For thousands of years, from roughly 2600 B.C.E. until the Arab conquest of Egypt in 641 C.E., mummification techniques were passed on largely by word of mouth among specially trained practitioners.

Embalmers had different recipes for preparing and preserving bodies depending on the era; the budget; the level of nobility and gender of the deceased; and the availability of ingredients such as plant resins, oils and other unguents that could preserve and perfume the remains. They probably added unique twists to their recipes as part of a personal style or to honor the characteristics of a particular individual.

In recent years, researchers including Huber and Stockhammer have studied the odor of ancient Egyptian mummies by using a clever but indirect strategy: removing trace residues of embalming materials or mummified remains from ceramic vessels. The scientists then analyze the residues for markers of different plants or embalming ingredients, like cedar oil or myrrh, to predict the different odor notes that might have made up the smell of a freshly prepared mummy.

Stockhammer, for example, led a team that analyzed residues left behind in ceramic vessels from a 2,700-year-old embalming workshop in Saqqara. His team found traces of conifer resins, beeswax, a black tar substance called bitumen and antiseptic oils that were deployed to both preserve bodies and give the dead a venerated—and perfumed—journey into the afterlife. Most of the ingredients came from beyond Egyptian borders, testifying to the existence of extensive ancient trade routes.

Huber, meanwhile, peered a thousand years deeper into the history of Egyptian mummification by scraping residues found in two 3,500-year-old canopic jars. These ancient vessels once held the mummified lungs and liver of a noblewoman named Senetnay, the esteemed wet nurse of the pharaoh Amenhotep II.

A limestone canopic jar that once held an organ of an Egyptian noblewoman named Senetnay © Museum August Kestner, Hannover / Photo by Christian Tepper

Huber's work suggested that the ancient Egyptians traded with Southeast Asia to acquire Pistacia tree resin for mummification a thousand years earlier than previously recorded. Building on her research, Huber worked with a perfumer to develop the "scent of eternity," a recreation of the ancient aroma of the mummification process, which the public had a chance to sniff at the Moesgaard Museum in Denmark in 2023.

---

These earlier studies were "fantastic, really exciting research" for understanding embalming practices and how mummies might have smelled during funerary ceremonies, Strlič says, but they didn't incorporate odor analysis of smells taken directly off of mummified bodies today.

Strlič was also keen capture these mummy odors as a way of informing conservators whether a mummy needs preservation treatment, akin to how modern medical researchers are learning to diagnose diseases such as cancer from a person's body odor or breath. In the case of a mummy, the odor of mold might be an early warning sign that fungi is growing deep within the textile before it becomes visible on the outside of the wrapped body, Strlič says.

To capture and analyze the odor of the nine mummies, the team emulated a technique used by perfumers to collect the aroma of rare flowers or other odors in the wild: gently vacuuming a scent into a cartridge. The cartridge contains a polymer material that traps odor molecules that are later released for chemical analysis.

The researchers initially planned to capture only the odors trapped in mummy display cases, "but when we arrived in Cairo, the museum curators gave us the possibility to put our odor sampling device inside the sarcophagus," says Paolin. One such sarcophagus belonged to a noblewoman named Ir-Aset-Udjat, whose coffin was ornately decorated with images and text that granted her food and drink in the afterlife.

Sampling of the microbial air quality surrounding the sarcophagi with the sedimentation method Emma Paolin

Other scent sources included the air above more recently excavated mummies in the museum's archive, as well as those in long-term storage. The team also collected large bags of aromatic air around the mummies so that a panel of people from Egypt and Europe could use their noses to identify top notes of the smells, similar to what is done nowadays for fine wines or whiskeys.

Paolin and her colleagues detected dozens of odorous chemicals in the mummy aromas, which they organized into four possible categories. The first was molecules from embalming ingredients such as oils, waxes and unguents. Other categories included odors from plant oils used by contemporary museum conservators to preserve mummies from degradation and smells from toxic synthetic pesticides such as naphthalene (present in moth balls), which were used in the past to shield mummies from deterioration but have since been discontinued to protect the health of conservators and the public. Finally, the team recorded a fourth category of odors that likely originated from microbial degradation triggered or exacerbated by the mummies' excavation.

A big challenge for the team was the fact that many of the mummy odors fit into more than one aroma category, Strlič says. For example, the scent of some of the mummies included a compound called nonanal, which smells like a combination of wax and orange peel. This odor could have come from the original mummification process, or it could be a product of biodegradation.

Likewise, the pine-tinged aroma of a molecule called alpha-pinene "could either be a contemporary pesticide or … a remaining compound of an essential oil used in the past," Strlič says.

---

Stockhammer says he's disappointed that Strlič's team couldn't categorically pin down the origins of all of the odors emanating off the mummies or conclusively distinguish what came from original embalming ingredients versus oils from a later treatment. But he adds that he is very excited by the study's approach to capturing smells directly off of archaeological objects, which holds potential for a field he refers to as "archaeology of the senses."

Strlič believes that some of the mummy smells can be directly attributed to specific sources—for instance, the almond-woody scent of furfural, which likely comes from linen wrappings or the wooden sarcophagi that house mummy remains. The researchers detected furfural wafting off mummies that hadn't been treated by preservation oils, and furfural is an aromatic component in the odor profile of old linen and wood.

Passive sampling using a solid phase microextraction fiber of air within a sarcophagus Emma Paolin

"We were very happy there were not any smells of rot related to [human bodies]," Strlič says, "because this would obviously indicate that the storage environment is not very good."

Strlič emphasizes that the "ethics of working with human bodies was [of] absolutely paramount concern for us." Currently, he says, no codified ethical guidelines exist for the handling of Egyptian mummified bodies in heritage science, so the team focused on several goals, including respecting local Egyptian customs for working with human remains and avoiding any permanent damage to the mummies.

Overall, "the mummies that were fairly recently excavated had more interesting notes," Strlič says, "much more earth-like, warmer and softer smells."

He adds, "Being able to do these analyses on a freshly excavated mummified body would be a very different experience, both sensorily and analytically."

The team is now working to recreate mummy scents so that museum visitors in Egypt and Slovenia can have the opportunity to sniff the unguents used in embalming or the odor of aging wooden sarcophagi—aromas that are otherwise trapped in time or within a museum case.

"Odors are a valuable part of cultural heritage," Strlič says. "We want to be able to communicate the experience of those odors to the public."

The scientists recorded dozens of scents, which they broke down into four categories, including embalming ingredients and odors from plant oils used by modern museum conservators. 

--   Sent from my Linux system.