What did historical mummies odor like? What varieties of scents, perfumes, and odors proliferated within the embalming workshops of Historic Egypt? Chemical analyses of artifacts by environmental historians, chemical engineers, and museum conservators are providing new insights into the scentscapes of antiquity, revealing the “woody,” “spicy,” and even “sweet” smells linked to Egyptian funerary practices. These rising scientific research are additionally serving to each museum conservators and curators recreate the sensory environments of the previous in new methods — reconnecting historical artwork with the historic smells that used to emanate from them and permitting for extra genuine heritage preservation.
Historic artwork is most frequently displayed inside sterile museum areas that lack odor altogether. However that is often not an correct reflection of their authentic show or context. Fragrances performed an necessary half in funerary rituals and within the efficiency of social standing in Historic Egypt specifically, along with being part of on a regular basis life. A brand new research within the Journal of the American Chemical Society underscores the ubiquity of nice smells connected to generally displayed objects, like sarcophagi and wrappings utilized in mummified stays.
Revealed by researchers from the Heritage Science Laboratory in Ljubljana, Slovenia, and the Institute for Sustainable Heritage at College School London, the scientists examined 9 mummies from the Egyptian Museum in Cairo as a way to reconstruct their odor profiles. Because the authors observe, there’s a cultural and scientific purpose for reconstructing scents.
“The history of the past is often presented to the public as odorless, despite the value of smell for artifact interpretation,” they observe. “Smells from heritage objects also hold a scientific value, as they can be used to obtain information about the original material, degradation pathways and rates, as well as conservation and restoration treatments and to better understand and interpret the heritage significance.”
Radar plots representing the odor profiles carried out by the heritage scientists, revealing mummies with “sweet, “woody,” “spicy,” and “herbal” profiles. (picture by way of Journal of the American Chemical Society)
Selecting to research the Cairo mummies was additionally necessary, the authors defined, as a result of whereas comparable analyses have been accomplished on mummies in European collections, many of those specimens have been handled with chemical brokers for preservation and museum storage following excavation within the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. European museums have additionally been identified to spray heritage objects with contaminating pesticides. Cairo’s Egyptian Museum presently makes use of a “pest oil” constituted of pure oils to repel bugs and corrosive components.
Olfactory profiles can inform us lots concerning the methods used to protect mummies in their very own time as nicely. Combining chemical evaluation of resins and residues with archaeological data of Egyptian embalming practices additionally supplies sturdy proof for historic smellscapes.
Perception into the embalming methods of Historic Egyptians specifically has drastically developed prior to now decade. In 2018, the Saqqara Saite Tombs Undertaking on the College of Tübingen in Germany introduced the invention of an embalming workshop on the necropolis of Saqqara, providing an unprecedented first look into mummification processes and the industrial commerce of funerary objects resembling funeral masks throughout the Saite-Persian interval (664-525 BCE).
Contained in the Saqqara advanced, there was an embalmer’s cachette, a mummification workshop, and a linked shaft tomb for collective burials. Giant basins, in depth ceramics, and vessels with embalming directions stuffed the workshop. The basins seem to have had natron, a substance used to dry out the physique previous to wrapping linen bandages round it. Scholar Ramadan Badry Hussein, who died in 2022, famous on the time of the invention that the findings marked a brand new space within the “archaeology of mummification.” Almost seven years later, researchers proceed to uncover new and aromatic revelations concerning the smells connected to the method of mummification.
(A) Coffin with a mummified physique (M7) within the show space of the Egyptian Museum in Cairo; (B) Passive sampling with SPME fiber of the headspace inside the coffin; (C) Lively sampling of the headspace inside the coffin was carried out with sorbent tubes. (picture by way of Journal of the American Chemical Society)
In contrast to the museums of immediately, the traditional world was a melange of advanced and significant smells. Whether or not it’s an incense burner pulled from a Byzantine residence or the patchouli wafting from a Roman fragrance bottle, recreating historical environments requires us to consider the multisensory context of objects and the those that made them. New archaeological discoveries coupled with advances in genetic and chemical evaluation of residues are permitting for higher conservation, preservation, and now the recreation of the signature scents of Historic Egypt specifically. Such analysis can also be seeping into the museum area.
In 2021, a recreation of the fragrance of Cleopatra VII produced a spicy-sweet and musky perfume with hints of recent myrrh and cinnamon. It was revealed following an earlier multimedia exhibition of the fragrance on the Nationwide Geographic Museum in Washington, DC. And in 2023, biomolecular analyses of the mummification balms from the Valley of the Kings revealed a mixture of “beeswax, plant oil, fats, bitumen, Pinaceae resins, a balsamic substance, and dammar or Pistacia tree resin.”
Such advances in olfactory analysis led to the latest multisensory exhibition Perfumes of Historic Egypt By way of the Ages on the Egyptian Museum in Cairo. As these scientific recreations and multisensory museum approaches counsel, there’s a rising recognition that odor is necessary to understanding the expertise of antiquity. Whereas not each museum gallery might quickly be crammed with the hints of myrrh, frankincense, or cinnamon, it’s a good reminder that the majority historical artifacts have been by no means meant to exist in a scentless area.
