“Unlocking the Secrets of the Afterlife: What Ancient Egyptian Mummies Reveal About Their Enigmatic Fragrances”
Using these findings, they are now working to recreate a composition of the smells, allowing visitors at the Egyptian Museum in Cairo to get a whiff of the mummies’ scents. In theory, this should also help researchers and museum curators be able to tell when mummified bodies are beginning to rot.
The Surprisingly Pleasant Scents Of Ancient Egyptian Mummies
The idea came to lead researcher Matija Strlič, a chemist at the University of Ljubljana, while touring a conservation laboratory a few years ago. As he tells Smithsonian Magazine, a mummy had recently arrived at the lab from an excavation and smelled surprisingly pleasant.
Emma PaolinScientists examined nine Egyptian mummies, then catalogued the dozens of scents they sampled.
“It had almost a cosmetic smell — pleasantly sweet and herbal,” he says. “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.”
Despite being nearly 5,000 years old in some cases, researchers were surprised to find that the mummies still smelled of the oils, waxes, and balms that had been applied to them during the mummification process.
“In films and books, terrible things happen to those who smell mummified bodies,” Cecilia Bembibre, one of the researchers on the study, told the BBC. “We were surprised at the pleasantness of them.”
How The Ancient Egyptian Embalming Process Imbued Corpses With Certain Scents
Cecilia BembibreEmma Paolin (left) and Abdelrazek Elnaggar (right) taking a sample of the scents from one sarcophagus.
Ancient Egyptian mummification was a meticulous process aimed at preserving the body for the afterlife, typically spanning about 70 days and involving several detailed steps.
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