Scientists recreate 3,500-year-old scent of ancient Egyptian mummy's balms

The visitors to an Egyptian museum are likely to be transported back more than 3,500 years with the scent of balms identified and recreated by researchers which were used in an ancient Egyptian noblewoman's mummification.

Although mummification appears to include bandages and jars, the process included fragrant items used to embalm the body and organs, so as to preserve them for the afterlife.

However, because of a lack of texts from ancient Egypt, it was difficult to reveal the exact ingredients used, which forced scientists to use modern analysis to select the substances involved. The researchers are now studying the residues of balms that were used for noblewoman Senetnay's mummification.

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The study has revealed that many of the ingredients used for embalming the body came from outside Egypt and helped them reproduce their perfume. “Senetnay’s mummification balm stands out as one of the most intricate and complex balms from that era,” stated Barbara Huber, the first author of the research from the Max Planck Institute of Geoanthropology.

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Ingredients of balms imported

Huber and his team analysed six samples of residues of the balms used for mummification which were discovered in two jars that once contained the liver and lungs of Senetnay, as indicated by hieroglyphic inscriptions.

It was found by the team that the balms included a complex mix of ingredients, which included fats and oils, beeswax, bitumen, resins from trees of the pine family, a substance called coumarin that has a vanilla-like scent, and benzoic acid, that can be discovered in many plant sources which include cloves and cinnamon. They emphasised that many of the ingredients would have been imported to Egypt.

“For instance, certain resins, like the larch tree resin, likely came from the northern Mediterranean and central Europe. One other substance was narrowed down to either a resin called dammar – exclusive to southeast Asian tropical forests – or Pistacia tree resin. In case it was dammar, this would highlight the extensive trade networks of the Egyptians during the mid-second millennium BCE, bringing in ingredients from afar,” said Huber.

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'Scent of the eternity'

The odour of the balm used on the Egyptian mummy was labelled as “the scent of the eternity”.

Expert in sensory history at the University of York Dr William Tullett said, “To our noses, the warm, resinous, pine-like odours of larch might be more reminiscent of cleaning products and the sulphurous scent of bitumen might put us in mind of asphalt. But for Egyptians, these smells clearly had a host of other meanings related to spirituality and social status. It’s those revealing comparisons between the here and now of smell that make recreations so interesting.”

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