Ancient incense, cosmetics and mummies: Scientists sniff out the scents of the past

What’s the first thing you notice when you step into a museum? Is it the long-faded colors of ancient artifacts from all around the world or the hushed sounds of visitors discussing what they see? Maybe there’s a replica of scratchy old fabric you can touch. Some locations might even offer an edible treat inspired by an ancient recipe. Museums allow us to indirectly experience the past by tapping into our primary senses—sight, hearing, taste, touch—but more often than not, smell is missing.

Representations of the past are often odorless. But smell probably played a huge role in many historical realities, says Barbara Huber, an archaeochemist at the Max Planck Institute of Geoanthropology in Germany. The conspicuous absence of scent in our study of history (not counting the musty tang of many museums) has inspired Huber and a growing community of chemists and archaeologists to track down some molecular remnants that can let us smell the past. For example, she created Scent of the Afterlife, a mix of aromas that captures the range of smells that would have accompanied mummification processes in ancient Egypt. Some of the recent advances in the quest to catch a whiff of history are featured in a new collection co-edited by Huber, Scents of Arabia: Interdisciplinary Approaches to Ancient Olfactory Worlds (Archaeopress, 2025).

READ MORE: What Sniffing Mummies Taught Scientists about an Ancient Society

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Scientific American spoke to Huber about the “science of smell” and its significance to our understanding of lives long gone.

An edited transcript of the interview follows.

We know smell is linked to very specific areas of the brain. What are these areas, and why does that link make olfactory interactions so important throughout history?

The sense of smell is very much connected to the parts of our brain that process emotion and memory. There’s also a very direct link from our olfactory bulb in the nose to the amygdala and the hippocampus in the brain, so we actually react to something we smell before we even think about it. And this process comes from a very long evolutionary tradition. Our ancestors needed this ability to memorize specific smells because they alerted them to danger.

We do not think nowadays about the major effect scent has on how we perceive and navigate the world. And it has a huge effect on our well-being—an interesting fact that COVID reminded us of, because people relearned how important the sense of smell was when they lost it.

We don’t really think about smell when studying the past. One of the problems is that, from a methodological point of view, it is incredibly hard to study. The scents and smells and stenches—whatever was there in the past—were already gone before archaeologists could come and investigate the sites. New chemical and biomolecular methods in archaeology have kind of reopened the door to continue to study these things. And of course, what we have from ancient texts can also help a lot.

When we do find all these details, they can enrich our understanding of many aspects of past ways of life, from medicine to perfumery and cosmetics to trade, as well as things such as identity or social status. There were wars over spices—these tiny powders and resins had such a strong effect on people that they went to war for them!

It’s fascinating to me that smell is tangible and intangible. How has studying something with that kind of duality changed your perspective on doing research?

The interesting thing is that these molecules that we detect, or that we are still able to detect, can tell us a lot about ancient materials. At the same time, when we reconstruct and re-create them like we did with Scent of the Afterlife, we can bring a piece of the past to visitors today. And that’s not just an object that has been found and excavated and then displayed in a museum. In a scent exhibit, people can actually perceive it. This way of perception is a kind of participation in the past. If you enter a room and can somehow smell how it must have smelled in a mummification room in ancient Egypt—and you see all the raw materials and everything—you’re being immersed in a different way in history and in learning.

Studies have shown that this multisensory way of learning—especially when it involves smell—can enhance how you think about specific things and enhance learning effects. I think that’s because it’s so connected to emotions. When you are at an exhibition, you might recollect memories when you smell something that is very tied to you. It connects us more deeply to earlier ways of life.

I was just thinking back to Scent of the Afterlife, the perfume you reconstructed from ancient Egyptian mummies, and the way everyone at SciAm reacted to the sample we had. We each remembered specific experiences from our own lives—for example, I said it smelled like a very well-managed “grandpa car.”

[Laughs.] That’s brilliant.

I’d love to hear more about the nitty-gritty science involved in the kind of analysis needed to re-create such smells.

We work with organic materials. Sometimes the original substance is not even there anymore—but we look for what we call scent archives. These are specific objects—a perfume flask or a cosmetic container or an incense burner—related to the kind of practices or actions that require scented materials. Say you have a scented cream, and there are remains of it, a crust or something like that, in your pot. Then we can take tiny samples and do an analysis on them. We first identify all the different compounds of the sample with gas chromatography to separate the various molecules in it, then we analyze it with mass spectrometry [an analytic method that identifies an unknown chemical compound based on its spectral behavior]. Then, basically, we’re able to identify every single compound.

It gives us clues about trade, for instance. We find all the different ingredients and look at whether these ingredients are local—Can people just go out there and harvest them? Or do they need to import them from distant lands?

How does decomposition affect the process? From what I understand, the compound you detected might not have been the original compound.

Let’s take, say, vanillin, a molecule that has a vanillalike scent. When we find vanillin, someone might jump to a conclusion and say, “Oh, we have vanilla! Oh, cool! They used vanilla in the past!” But vanillin is also a decomposition product of a larger molecule called lignin, a common component of woody tissue. So a lot of wood things have this vanillin compound when they break down. Thus, when you find it, you need to be very careful because there isn’t always only one possibility for where it came from. We do a lot of detective work on our side to analyze what we have and try to make sense of it.

The introduction to your book says it “challenges traditional trade-focused narratives.” What does that mean?

Regarding ancient materials—especially aromatic materials in Arabia—the study of trade and the incense road [a network covering a broad area from the Arabian Peninsula to the Mediterranean and dealing mostly with the circulation of incense] was always an interesting point for researchers. But the problem is that the incense road was very often looked at from the perspective of classical scholars—so, texts from ancient Greece or Rome. From the very start, the story of the incense road was told by outsiders who were also not really contemporary. We don’t have any evidence from the earlier periods, the Iron Age and the Bronze Age, in ancient Arabia. So for us, it was most interesting to look at evidence other than ancient texts that can tell us a little bit more about the trade of aromatics.

Is there a particular chapter or case study that comes to mind when you think about the overall framework or objectives of the anthology?

In one case study, we looked at the content of incense burners and found a plant in the genus Peganum. Its common name is Syrian rue, and it’s a medicinal and psychoactive plant. We realized that in these incense burners specifically, people used it for therapeutic or psychoactive purposes. This finding was very interesting because it means the practice of incense burning seems to not only be sensorial but also have this medicinal component.

The close study of these incense burners revealed something we’d had absolutely no idea about: medicinal practices in Arabia before the Islamic period. We all of a sudden had an idea of how people used their local pharmacopoeia [their collection of available medicinal ingredients] for treating illnesses; in this case, they burned the substance and then probably inhaled the smoke, rather than just applying it to the skin or drinking it as an infusion.

The practice of burning incense, which is very linked to Arabia—there is the incense road and emblematic scents such as frankincense and myrrh—left a legacy that is still alive today. Although it’s part of people’s lives today, it goes all the way back. In the book, we basically follow it to the roots of where it began, how it shaped societies and the identity of a particular part of the world—and, of course, how it remains connected.

For me, the collection reminds me that history isn’t something we only see.