Egyptology
Museum visitors are transported back to 1450 BC by the smell of oils, resins and beeswax that the noblewoman used to embalm Senetnay. BC
Museum visitors will be transported back more than 3,500 years as they sniff, after researchers identified and recreated the scent of balm used in the mummification of an ancient Egyptian noblewoman.
While mummification involves scenes with bandages and glasses, the process was a fragrant affair in which the body and organs were embalmed to preserve them for the afterlife.
However, since there are few texts from ancient Egypt that reveal the exact ingredients used, scientists have used modern analysis to figure out the substances involved.
Now researchers studying residues of balms used in the mummification of a noblewoman named Senetnay have not only discovered that many of her ingredients came from outside Egypt, but have also reproduced her perfume.
“Senetnay’s mummification balm is considered one of the most complicated and complex balms from this period,” said Barbara Huber, the study’s lead author from the Max Planck Institute for Geoanthropology.
The team wrote in the journal Scientific Reports that Senetnay appeared around 1450 B.C. lived and was the wet nurse of Pharaoh Amenhotep II.
Senetnay’s canopic vessels – vessels in which the mummified organs of the deceased were stored – were discovered in a tomb in the Valley of the Kings in 1900 by Howard Carter, the British archaeologist who later became famous for his role in the discovery of Tutankhamun’s tomb.
Huber and colleagues analyzed six samples of mummification balm residue from two jars that once contained Senetnay’s lungs and liver, hieroglyphic inscriptions show.
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The team found that the balms contained a complex mix of ingredients, including fats and oils, beeswax, bitumen, resins from trees in the pine family, a substance called coumarin with a vanilla-like scent, and benzoic acid, which is found in many plant sources, including Cinnamon and cloves.
They point out that many of the ingredients had to be imported into Egypt.
“Certain resins, such as larch resin, probably come from the northern Mediterranean and Central Europe,” said Huber. “Another substance has been narrowed down to either a resin called dammar – found exclusively in Southeast Asian tropical forests – or pistacia tree resin. If it was Dammar, it would reflect the extensive trading networks of the Egyptians in the middle of the second millennium BCE. “Highlight the ingredients from afar.”
However, not all of the identified ingredients were present in both jars, which could indicate that the balms were organ-specific. However, the team found that it could also be that they were originally the same but were poorly mixed or had broken down in different ways.
The researchers said that few mummies would have received the elaborate treatment that Senetnay received, which, together with the non-local origin of many ingredients, supported the assumption that she had a high social status – a situation already suggested by the location of her Funeral and her burial was indicated by her title: Ornament of the King.
Huber added that the team worked with a perfumer to recreate the scent of the balms, which would be used in an exhibition at the Moesgaard Museum in Denmark this fall.
The scent of the balm is called the “scent of eternity”.
dr William Tullett, an expert in sensory history at the University of York who was not involved in the work, said recovering smells from history is crucial to understanding the relationship between the past and present.
“To our nose, the warm, resinous and pine-like scents of larch might remind us of cleaning products, and the sulfurous smell of bitumen might remind us of asphalt. But for the Egyptians, these smells clearly had a variety of other meanings related to spirituality and social status,” he said. “It’s these insightful comparisons between the here and now of smell that make replicas so interesting.”
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