In an innovative endeavor to create a sensory bridge to the ancient past, a team of researchers has recreated one of the scents used in the mummification of an important Egyptian woman more than 3500 years ago.
Coined ‘the scent of eternity’, the ancient aroma will be presented at the Moesgaard Museum in Denmark in an upcoming exhibition, offering visitors a unique sensory experience: to encounter firsthand an ambient smell from antiquity – and catch a whiff of the ancient Egyptian process of mummification.
The team’s research centered on the mummification substances used to embalm the noble lady Senetnay in the 18th dynasty, circa 1450 BCE. The researchers utilized advanced analytical techniques – including Gas Chromatography-Mass Spectrometry, High-Temperature Gas Chromatography-Mass Spectrometry, and Liquid Chromatography-Tandem Mass Spectrometry – to reconstruct the substances that helped to preserve and scent Senetnay for eternity.
“We analyzed balm residues found in two canopic jars from the mummification equipment of Senetnay that were excavated over a century ago by Howard Carter from Tomb KV42 in the Valley of the Kings,” says researcher Barbarra Huber. Today, the jars are housed in the Museum August Kestner in Hannover, Germany. The team found that the balms contained a blend of beeswax, plant oil, fats, bitumen, Pinaceae resins (most likely larch resin), a balsamic substance, and dammar or Pistacia tree resin.
Among those imported ingredients were larch tree resin, which likely came from the northern Mediterranean, and possibly dammars, which come exclusively from trees in Southeast Asian tropical forests. If the presence of dammar resin is confirmed, as in balms recently identified from Saqqara dating to the 1st millennium BCE, it would suggest that the ancient Egyptians had access to this Southeast Asian resin via long-distant trade almost a millennium earlier than previously known.
AR #69
Lincoln and the Afterlife
by Susan Martinez, Ph.D.
