![]() ![]() ![]() Frankincense and myrrh are both spicy-smelling resins extracted from shrubs and trees that grow on the Arabian Peninsula and in northeastern Africa and India. Researchers generally assume that Tayma was a pit stop on an ancient network of trade routes, known as the Incense Route, that carried frankincense and myrrh from southern Arabia to Mediterranean destinations around 2,300 to 1,900 years ago. That sort of detective work is exactly what Huber, of the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History in Jena, Germany, and her colleagues did in research on the walled oasis settlement of Tayma in what’s now Saudi Arabia. Unraveling the molecular makeup of residue clinging to such a find “can determine what exactly was burned and reconstruct whether it was the scent of frankincense, myrrh, scented woods or blends of different aromatics,” says archaeologist Barbara Huber. Finding an ancient incense burner indicates only that a substance of some kind was burned. Take the humble incense burner, for instance. Molecular odorsĪ growing array of biomolecular techniques is enabling the identification of molecules from ancient aromatic substances preserved in cooking pots and other containers, in debris from city garbage pits, in tartar caked on human teeth and even in mummified remains. In studying and reviving scents of the past, these researchers aim to understand how ancient people experienced, and interpreted, their worlds through smell. Others are poring over ancient texts for references to perfume recipes, and have even cooked up a scent much like one presumably favored by Cleopatra. Some archaeologists are sniffing out odor molecules from artifacts found at dig sites and held in museums. Ancient cities in Egypt and elsewhere have been presented as “colorful and monumental, but odorless and sterile,” Goldsmith says.Ĭhanges are in the air, though. Piecing together, much less re-creating, the olfactory landscapes, or smellscapes, of long-ago places has attracted even less scholarly curiosity. Rare projects have re-created what people may have heard thousands of years ago at sites such as Stonehenge ( SN: 8/31/20). Investigations have reconstructed what ancient buildings looked like based on excavated remains and determined how people lived by analyzing their tools, personal ornaments and other tangible finds. ![]() No such study has been conducted.Īrchaeologists have traditionally studied visible objects. A full grasp of ancient Egyptian culture requires a comprehensive examination of how pharaohs and their subjects made sense of their lives through smell, she contends. “The written sources demonstrate that ancient Egyptians lived in a rich olfactory world,” says Egyptologist Dora Goldsmith of Freie Universität Berlin. ![]()
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