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 in 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 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 Tübingen in Germany, and Carol Calvay is a perfumer and founder of Iris and Morphée based in Paris. I'm so excited to follow my nose into this story with you two. 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 fragrant 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 status and social standing. It was something to create group identity, but also to divide. So it had 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 on the mummy before you enter 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 fragrant 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 also working on reviving ancient scents I mean what your perspective on this importance of understanding smell in ancient times? I always say that recreating scents from the past allow us to travel through time and space. So scents 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, very strong, in fact. I'm sure you never forget the first time you smell an ancient Egyptian embalming process. Yes, for sure. People, most of the time, they are like, wow. And wow, it smells 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 smokiness. It smells a little bit like a barbecue. you what else oh yeah we also found a resin which is either damar or bestatia resin this gives it a bit of a of a freshness um maybe very slightly citrusy and so all together uh i've always found it was a very kind of like elegant scent it was really nicely kind of balanced uh in a way and it was also very complex because it was not just something that was super sweet it had these different notes. 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 omification, the first thing you do is you remove the organs from the body. In the belief of the ancient Egyptians, they needed the organs to live on in the afterlife. So what they did is they also mummified the organs separately and then put them in different chars. We call them canopic chars. And so what we found out by studying 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 typical 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 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 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 the substance and so on. So, Carol, as a perfumer, tell me about the process to take some of these molecules that Barbara has extracted and actually turn 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 was the scent of the raw material? And at the end, I have two lists of raw materials, some like beeswax. But for sure, it's not the same beeswax that the one that was used in the past. And for the other list, it was like full of words. 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 scents together, in fact. It's a real composition. I want to go back, Barbara, and ask you, when we talk about the molecular process here, 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 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. We work with degraded molecules. There might have been another substance, another ingredient 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 these 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 Karol 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... To be embalmed, 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 canopic 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 this char and smell the scent there. So it's kind of like an ambient scent of an embalming chamber or an embalming 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 you have all these like studies about polychromy and so on but they also were scented and there is this idea that perhaps if if you give the statue a kind of scent you also bring it back to life but yes they also used it in in uh in daily life and there were specific scents that were really just allowed for the pharaoh or allowed for the for the empress and specific scents 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 frankincense and myrrh. And I think it was Pliny who wrote that one of the Roman emperors, I think it was Nero for the funeral of his wife, asked for so much frankincense, which Arabia could produce in three years or something like that. They already knew 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 resins. Well, that's about all the time that we have for now. Thank you so much for introducing me to the idea that frankincense 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.
