Egyptian mummies still carry a pleasant odour, experts have revealed, owing to the embalming process these ancient royals underwent thousands of years ago.
Experts who recently investigated the scents of nine mummies said they still retained a faint “woody”, “spicy” and “sweet” smell, despite being deceased as long ago as the 3rd century BCE.
The bodies were covered with oils, waxes, and balms during the mummification process so they maintained a pleasant smell long after they passed away.
“We want to share the experience we had smelling the mummified bodies, so we’re reconstructing the smell to be presented in the Egyptian Museum in Cairo,” Cecilia Bembibre, one of the researchers, told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme.
The researchers peeked inside the sarcophagus to determine the scent, which could go some way to dispel myths – disseminated in popular culture – about these Ancient Egyptian relics.
“In films and books, terrible things happen to those who smell mummified bodies,” he said. “We were surprised at the pleasantness of them.”
The use of pine and juniper resins in the embalming process gave the mummies, some of them dead for 5,000 years, a floral essence.
The bodies that underwent this treatment were primarily aristocrats due to bad smells having negative associations, meaning that even after death and being sealed away from the public, these royals still had to maintain a pleasant aroma.
“It tells us potentially what social class a mummy was from and therefore reveals a lot of information about the mummified body that is relevant not just to conservators, but to curators and archaeologists as well,” said Matija Strlič, a chemistry professor at the University of Ljubljana.
“We believe that this approach is potentially of huge interest to other types of museum collections.”
The results of the study were published in the Journal of the American Chemical Society.
