Science Friday - Who Wants To Smell An Ancient Embalmed Mummy?

Episode Date: February 11, 2026

Wandering through a museum, you can get a glimpse of what life in ancient societies looked like. But what did it smell like? And is it even possible to get a whiff of, say, a freshly embalmed mummy, or a 5,000-year-old Saudi Arabian incense burner? That’s exactly what some chemists and olfactory designers are trying to do.Producer Kathleen Davis talks with archeo-chemist Barbara Huber and perfumer Carole Calvez about how they scientifically recreated the scent of ancient Egyptian mummies and brought that smell to museums on special cards.Guests:Dr. Barbara Huber is an archeo-chemist at the University of Tübingen in Germany.Carole Calvez is a perfumer and olfactory designer and a cofounder of  Iris & Morphée in Paris, France. Transcripts for each episode are available within 1-3 days at sciencefriday.com.  Subscribe to this podcast. Plus, to stay updated on all things science, sign up for Science Friday's newsletters.

Hey, I'm Kathleen Davis, and you're listening to Science Friday. This time of year with freezing temperatures and short days, you might be turning towards smells to lift your spirits, like a cozy candle or maybe a simmering stew, or an anticipation of Valentine's Day, roses and chocolates. But here at Science Friday, we're particularly partial to the scent of an embalmed ancient Egyptian mummy or 5,000-year-old Saudi Arabia. Arabian incense burners. You might be thinking these ancient smells are no longer sniffable, but not to my next two guests who are working to bring these scents back to life to get a smellier perspective of history.

Dr. Barbara Huber is an archaeochemist at the University of Tubingen in Germany, and Carol Calvay is a perfumer and founder of Iris and Morfay based in Paris. I'm so excited to follow my nose into the story with you, too. Thank you so much for being here. Thank you so much for having us. Yes, thank you so much. Okay, Barbara, I want to do maybe some myth-busting to start us off. Was the ancient world smellier than today's world?

And also, why try to recreate an ancient scent at all? I mean, do you think there's something that we can learn about ancient life through smell that maybe we can't know otherwise? The past, how it is conceptualized nowadays for us, is incredibly odorless. But the people in the past had an incredibly odorous life, so to say, because they used so many different aromatic substances. So people used specific smells, which were good, like frequent resins or really balsamic notes, really rich and sweet and intense scents, to cover up bad smells, such as the waste in the street or uncomfortable smells that you might not like.

They used perfume as a kind of marker of statues and social standing. It was something to create group identity but also to divide. So it had like so many different meanings, also in rituals and practices, especially in mummification, but also in all sorts of other rituals. Think about incense burning in temples, offering rituals and so on. So when we not look at the scented component of the past, we miss out. and we don't really kind of get an entire aspect of ancient life. And so that's why we focus on these like aromatic substances that people used.

And we can also learn so much from the substances itself because most of them have been traded over very long distances. So looking at these aromatics, we also learn about connectivity in the past, trade routes, how specific groups were connected with each other. Some of them, for example, the ancient Egyptians, we found out that they took resins from very far away from Southeast Asia. So it seems that they already had access. They had trade connections there, you know?

So they're kind of like a gateway to learn more diverse aspects of the past. So maybe a more pungent time, both good and bad. But of all the ancient smells that you could have recreated, why the ancient Egyptian embalming process? Yeah, that's a good question. So the idea behind this project, we wanted to do a chemical analysis on these embalming materials. So the materials that were used to really embalm the mummy in the process of mummification.

And we wanted to see what is the recipe, what kind of substances did they apply to mummify the body and to kind of preserve it for eternity in the afterlife? And also how mummification is described in ancient texts, it's nothing that is kind of stinky. On the contrary, some people call it the last perfume of a person, the last embalming material that is put on the mummy before you answer the afterlife and before you live on forever in the afterlife. And when we analyzed tiny samples of the mummification balms, we realized that there were so many fragrance, substances in it. And so in order to bring this kind of like relatively complex chemical information that we found out, we decided to kind of recreate this last perfume that the mummy was covered with. And yeah. Carol, as a perfumer who's also working on reviving ancient sense, I mean, what's your perspective on this importance of understanding smell in ancient times?

I always say that recreating sense from the past allow us to travel through time and space. So sense are a way to bring life to the past. So for me, it's a way to learn more because the moment you smell something for the first time, you will never forget it. You can have it in memory very strong, in fact. I'm sure you never forget the first time you smell an ancient Egyptian embalming process. For sure. People, most of the time, they act like, wow. And wow, it smell not so bad, in fact. Yeah, I want to dig into that a little bit more, Barbara. Maybe you can help me untangle this a little bit.

But I know you talked a little bit about the different components that went into the embalming process. Can you kind of break those down for me a little bit more and tell me like what those individual components smelled like in that process? Yeah, sure. So our balm was a mixture of several different ingredients. And so one that was very prominent was a coniferous resin from a large tree. So this really smells a little bit like when you walk through a forest. And then we also have, for example, beeswax in it, which gives it a kind of like sweetness. Then we have these balsams, which are also relatively sweet, rich balsamic in their notes. And then we also found a very interesting component, which we didn't really expect, which was bitumen.

And bitumen is kind of like crude oil, but dried, a little bit like, you know, the asphalt on a street. And this really smells also like that. It has a very intense, a smokiness. It smells a little bit like a barbecue. What else? Oh, yeah, we also found a resin. which is either damar or bestatia resin. This gives it a bit of a freshness,

maybe very slightly citrusy. And so all together, I've always found it was a very kind of like elegant scent. It was really nicely kind of balanced in a way. And it was also very complex because it was not just something that was super sweet. It had these different nodes. It had the smokiness, but also a sweetness,

a kind of freshness from the resins and so on. So when I smelled it the first time, I was really amazed. And in this embalming process, were these different oils and scents layered onto the body? Were they on like the wrappings around the body? How did that actually work as far as we know? So in the process of homification, the first thing you do is you remove the organs from the body. And the belief of the ancient Egyptians, they needed their organs to live on in the afterlife. So what they did is they also mummified the organs separately and then put them in different charers. We call them conopic chars. And so what we found out by studying like these kind of like remains is that they make a mummification mixture. And you wrap the mummy in bandages or also the organs in bandages. And then this entire char filled with the organs is filled with this mummification substance which kind of seals.

the organs and also that's the reason why it is not a bad smell because like the mummy is dried out the mummy doesn't stink it smells pleasant so i imagine that some of these products like the beeswax the coniferous tree i mean these decompose over time to an extent so i want to talk about how you actually are able to pull these scent molecules and do something with them yes so what we do with our samples when we get that, we can work with very tiny amounts. And we first do a process of like chromatography. This means that we just separate all the different compounds that are in our mixture into single molecules. And then we detect them with mass spectrometry and identify the different components. What we end up with, what we end up is a kind of like mixture of

different molecules, right? And then our specific molecules that are very took. for specific substances. For example, we have molecules that are very typical for these coniferous resins. So even though we have a kind of degradation process happening, we have like so-called biomarkers that are very typical markers for a substance. And if we identify them, we can still reconstruct the substance based on the still existing markers of a plant. Or sometimes we know that specific molecules degrade in a specific way. And based on that, we could still, still come back to the original molecule, what was originally there. But at the end, we try to understand of all the different products that are still there, where did they come from,

what is the original substance that produced these molecules, and then we come up with these recipes. But it's a lot of work. It's really like a detective work, looking for specific molecules that you can find, which hint to this substance and so on. Mm-hmm. So Carol, as a perfumer, tell me about the process to take some of these molecules that Barbara has extracted and actually turned them into a scent. So I had all the list of the raw materials, and for each one, I try to see if I can find it in the perfumery field today. And if not, what were the scent of the raw material? And at the end, I have two lists of our raw material. And at the end, I have two lists of a row material. materials, some like beeswax, but for sure it's not the same beeswax that's the one that were used in the past. And for the other list, it was like full of words, a smoky animalic also. It was a bit coniferous, a bit citrusy. So I use these words to find raw materials I can use to recreate

the scent together in fact. It's a real composition. I want to go back, Barbara, and ask you, when we talk about like the molecular process here, you know, how do you really know that you've recreated the scent properly? I mean, it would be great to ask somebody who was alive back then if this is, you know, a match for the smell, but we can't. So how do you know? We cannot. We will never know. We work with patchy data, you know. We work with degraded molecules. There might have been another substance. is another ingredients that was also there.

And it just evaporated. It was too unstable and we don't have these molecules. So we can only work with what we are now able to identify and based on that, make this reconstruction. But I always say it in this way. We see the scent reconstruction more as an educational tool. We don't aim for 100% authenticity. And as you said, we can never ask people.

but we would like to give people a feeling of what it could have been. And by understanding also, by smelling these ingredients, you would still learn about these processes more in a different way because you better understand the different materials that went in. You ask maybe different questions when you smell it and not just read on it. And so we will never 100% be sure if this is correct. but we try to get as close as possible with the data we have. Okay, we have to stop and smell the roses for a quick break,

but when we come back, we will take a sniff of a few more ancient scents and see how much our scent preferences have changed over time. Stay with us. Okay, so you brought these scents out of the lab and to a museum. Can you tell me a little bit about what the visitor experience is like? like how do they actually access the smell within the museum? So we produced this small scent cards. They look a little bit like a business card.

And we have used a technique which is called scent printing. So basically you have the extract, the perfume that Carole has created. And then you infuse the card with this essence. And we usually, we call this card like a time machine for your nose because the aim is to transport you back to the past to get an idea or a little bit of a different perspective how it was to live in ancient Egypt and to be embalmed. And the other way of how we all want to know how it would be like. Sure.

This was at the Moskart Museum in Denmark. And so there was one room which was the embalming workshop. And so when you entered this room, you could see different Knobe. chars and mummies and bandages and basically all the different steps that are needed for the mummification. And within the chars, we placed a cartridge with the scent. And then people could open the lid of these chars and smell the scent there. So it's kind of like an ambient scent of an embalming chamber or an balming workshop, if you want. And so the feedback we got from the people is that they really had the feeling of,

I'm kind of in this together with the people of the past and they're not just experiencing with their eyes. They really experience it with their entire body by smelling. And smell, of course, adds this emotional layer because it's like so closely connected to our part in the brain, which is responsible for processing memory and emotion. So you have a different way of experiencing this when you experience it via scent or olfaction and not just reading or seeing or hearing something. You know, you mentioned earlier that people in ancient times did perfume themselves

to either, you know, maybe mask a worse smell or just for, you know, adornment. What do we know about ancient perfumes? What did they smell like? We have from several different sources, some textual references on these perfumes. There are a lot of Roman perfumes, Greek perfumes, also ancient Egyptian perfumes. And they were not just used for the people. They were also used for the gods. And so, for example, some statues of gods have actually been anointed with scented oil or perfumes. And it was a very interesting study also, a Danish study, that showed that these

Greeks statues had actually not just color. So we have all these studies about polychromy and on, but they also were scented. And there is this idea that perhaps if you give the statue a kind of scent, you also bring it back to life. But yes, they also used it in daily life. And there were specific scents that were really just allowed for the pharaoh or allowed for the empress. And specific sense were used or connected with a specific ritual. When you go in a church, in a Catholic church, and you smell this frankincense. It's like a smell mark of a situation. And the perfumes itself, they were probably very expensive.

And so from what we know is this was really a gesture also for elites to showcase what access they have. Because a lot of the substances that we see in the perfumes, they were not like readily available nearby. They were sometimes imported from far away. and they had this kind of like exotic notion to it. And so sometimes it was also to show the standing of a person because when the person was able to wear this perfume, it means you belong to the elite. You were rich. You could actually afford that. Yeah. I mean, whole wars were fought over spices. I would imagine that if you smell

desirable, then that shows that you have power and authority. Absolutely. Yeah. And I mean, there was like, For example, in the Roman Empire, there was so much desire, for example, for frankincennes and myrr. And I think it was Pliny who wrote that one of the Roman emperors, I think it was narrow for the funeral of his wife, asked for so much frankincense, which Arabia could produce in three years or something like that. You know, like they already knew that that was lavish. That was completely out of the normal range, out of scale. So, yeah, there was really a certain trend and a certain demand. for specific resents. Well, that's about all the time that we have for now.

Thank you so much for introducing me to the idea that Frankencents is the emperor's scent, because now that's what I'm going to be cloaking myself in from here on out. Dr. Barbara Huber, archaeochemist and Carol Calvay, perfumer and olfactory designer. Thank you both so much for being here. Thank you so much. It was so fun talking. Thank you so much.

This episode was produced by, D. Peter Schmidt. I'm Kathleen Davis. Smell you later. Thanks for listening.