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Scientists have decoded an ancient aroma by identifying the ingredients used in Egyptian mummification balms – and brought the scent back to life.
Anyone who wants to feel that hint of the past will be able to discover what researchers have dubbed “the scent of eternity” at an upcoming exhibition at the Moesgaard Museum in Denmark.
The scent, also called the “scent of eternal life,” is based on beeswax, vegetable oils and tree resins from distant lands that the team found in balms used more than 3,500 years ago to preserve Senetnay, a noblewoman whose remains were kept in canopic vessels were preserved and discovered in 1900 in the Egyptian Valley of the Kings.
The discovery provides insight into Senetnay’s social status as well as the methods used to preserve her remains and the significance of the balm ingredients. A study detailing the findings was published Thursday in the journal Scientific Reports.
“The embalming ingredients contained in Senetnay’s balms are among the most elaborate and diverse ever identified from this period, and demonstrate the meticulous care and sophistication with which the balms were created,” said lead study author Barbara Huber, a doctoral student at Max Planck -Institute for Geoanthropology in Germany.
“The presence of such a wide variety of ingredients, including exotic substances such as dammar or pistacia tree resin, indicates that extremely rare and expensive materials were used for their embalming,” Huber added. “This points to Senetnay’s exceptional status in society.”
Little is known about Senetnay, but previous research has suggested that they lived around 1,450 BC. 500 BC and was the wet nurse of Pharaoh Amenhotep II, the long-awaited son and heir of Pharaoh Thutmose III. She looked after Amenhotep II and breastfed him as an infant.
According to historical records, Senetnay was given the title of “Ornament of the King” and became a valued member of the pharaoh’s entourage. After her death, Senetnay’s vital organs were embalmed and placed in four canopic vessels with lids shaped like human heads.
The Egyptians carefully removed organs such as the lungs, liver, stomach and intestines during the mummification process to prevent the growth of bacteria and better protect the body. According to the study, Egyptians believed in preserving the body for the afterlife so that a person’s soul would have a place to return to.
After the embalming process, the jars were placed in a royal tomb in the Valley of the Kings, where Egyptologist Howard Carter found them in 1900. Senetnay’s body was not recovered. (Carter was later credited with the discovery of Tutankhamun’s tomb in 1922.)
Senetnay’s inclusion in the Valley of the Kings, “a necropolis usually reserved for pharaohs and powerful nobles,” suggests “extraordinary privileges and the high esteem that Senetnay likely enjoyed from the pharaoh,” according to the study.
“This work provides insight into the great effort that the Egyptians made in their burial practices, not only for pharaohs but also for other people in society,” said study co-author Nicole Boivin, research group leader at the Max Planck Institute for Geoanthropology . “But it also makes clear that Senetnay was an important person whose significance goes beyond the simple description of her as wet-nurse to the future Pharaoh Amenhotep II.”
The two vessels that once contained Senetnary’s lungs and liver have been part of the Egyptian collection at the August Kestner Museum in Hanover since 1935. They survived the destruction of World War II by being stored in a salt mine. The other two jars, which were not part of the study, are kept in other collections.
The contents are long gone, but researchers were able to scrape out the inside of the jars to examine the residue left behind by the balms as well as what had seeped into the jars’ porous limestone.
The exact recipes used in mummification have long been disputed, as ancient Egyptian texts do not mention exact ingredients. The team began research in 2021 to identify the balm’s ingredients using a variety of sophisticated analytical techniques. The balms differed slightly between the two jars, meaning different ingredients may have been used depending on which organ was being preserved.
The balms contained beeswax, vegetable oils, animal fats, the naturally occurring petroleum product bitumen and resins. Compounds such as coumarin and benzoic acid were also present. Coumarin, which has a vanilla-like scent, is found in pea plants and cinnamon. Benzoic acid is found in resins and gums from trees and shrubs.
In the jar where Senetnay’s lungs were stored, researchers discovered fragrant resin from larch trees and what is either dammar from trees from India and Southeast Asia or resin from pistacia trees, which belong to the cashew family.
“The presence of certain ingredients indicates that the Egyptians had established extensive trade routes and networks. “In particular, the presence of larch resin – which comes from the northern Mediterranean and Central Europe – and possibly dammars, resin found exclusively in Southeast Asian tropical forests, underlines the enormous reach of Egyptian trade routes in the middle of the 2nd millennium BC. BC,” said Huber.
Researchers are still working to confirm whether dammar was one of the ingredients.
“If it is Dammar, it has come a shockingly long way, and this provides new insights into ancient trading networks,” Boivin said in an email. “Travel was extremely difficult and significant expeditions by sea were still relatively rare. It is unlikely that the Egyptians themselves went to these distant lands, but rather that they were part of exchange networks that were connected to other networks. But those were the early stages of the globalized world we live in today.”
If dammar is confirmed as an ingredient, it would also suggest that Egyptians had access to the resin nearly a millennium earlier than expected, the study authors said. Dammar was recently identified as an embalming ingredient in Saqqara and dates back to the first millennium BC. Chr.
The new findings suggest that the relatively complex balms used in Senetnay’s preservation may have been the start of a trend toward later use of more elaborate balms.
After identifying the ingredients, the research team worked with French perfumer Carole Calvez and sensory museologist Sofia Collette Ehrich to recreate the balm’s actual scent.
The painstaking process took months and multiple iterations to create a historically accurate and evocative flavor, Huber said.
“When I saw the scent for the first time, it was a profound and almost surreal experience,” she said. “After investing so much time in research and analysis, it was moving to finally have this tangible, aromatic connection to antiquity. It was like carrying a faint echo from the past.”
The research team wanted to give museum visitors a more immersive experience of the ancient world by incorporating an olfactory element, while also making it more accessible to visually impaired visitors, she said. “The Fragrance of Eternal Life” will be part of an ancient Egyptian exhibition at the Danish museum opening in October.
“Scent creates a unique, visceral connection to the past and evokes a sense of time travel “It’s intimate and impressive,” said Huber. “By reintroducing this ancient aroma, we want to bridge the gap between then and now and allow visitors to truly breathe in a fragment of antiquity.”