Egypt: Four Thousand Years of Scent, from the Embalming Workshop to the Expedition to Punt

While in Larsa, someone was carefully logging how many minas of myrrh had arrived at the warehouse, something fundamentally different was happening to scent in Egypt: it was being burned. The word "perfume" comes from the Latin per fumum, "through smoke" — an echo of precisely this Egyptian custom. Where the Mesopotamians steeped aromatics in oil, the Egyptians above all burned them as incense, or macerated them in vegetable oil or animal fat (distilled alcohol, of course, didn't exist yet). And they kept doing it, without interruption, for four thousand years — from the building of the pyramids to Cleopatra.

A workshop that smelled of global trade

At Saqqara, the necropolis of the old capital Memphis, archaeologists excavated an embalming workshop from the 26th Dynasty (664–525 BC). A team led by Barbara Rageot published it in 2023 in the journal Nature — and the result is more detailed than one might expect. Chemical analysis (gas chromatography-mass spectrometry) was run on 31 of the 121 vessels found in the workshop, and for most of them the residues could be matched to the inscription written directly on the vessel describing what it was used for. The result rewrote part of the vocabulary: the terms antiu and sefet, long translated simplistically as "myrrh" and "sacred oil," in fact denoted broader categories of mixtures.

What's most interesting, though, is where the raw materials came from. Dammar and elemi — resins from trees growing in Southeast Asia and India — turned up in the vessels alongside pistachio, cedar, and juniper from the Mediterranean. That means the embalming workshop at Saqqara was plugged into a trade network stretching across the entire known world of the time, thousands of kilometres from Egypt. And embalming itself is far older than this workshop suggests: chemical analysis of linen wrappings from the Mostagedda and Badari cemeteries (Jones, Higham, Buckley and others, PLOS ONE, 2014) showed that the deliberate use of resinous, antibacterial embalming agents goes back to the late Neolithic, roughly 4500–3350 BC — some 1,500 years earlier than previously thought.

Kyphi: a recipe that survived three thousand years

The most sacred Egyptian scent was called kap.t — in Greek, kyphi — and it was burned in temples at sunset. The oldest surviving recipe is recorded in the medical Ebers Papyrus (around 1550 BC, entry 852); further versions are carved directly into the temple walls at Edfu and Dendera. The Ebers Papyrus gives a specific list: dried myrrh, juniper berries, incense (sntr), camphor wood, pistachio resin, "reed from the land of Djahi" (Canaan, probably sweet flag), two ingredients still unidentified today, and styrax — all ground fine, mixed, and part of the blend burned. Its purpose was practical and sacred at once: kyphi scented the home and clothing alike, but it was also reportedly chewed as a breath freshener.

The Egyptian scent that became most famous in the ancient world, though, went by a different name — the Mendesian, after the city of Mendes in the Nile Delta. Pliny the Elder describes how the centre of fame for scented oils shifted over time: "In old days the most highly esteemed unguents came from the island of Delos, and afterwards from Mendes" (Naturalis Historia 13.2.4). Dioscorides, Pliny, Galen and other Greek and Roman authors agree on the basic ingredients of the Mendesian scent — balanos oil, myrrh, cassia, and resin — but none of them was Egyptian, and their recipes are a Greek and Roman view of Egyptian perfumery, not necessarily an accurate transcription of the original. The Egyptian sources themselves have no recipe for the Mendesian scent as such; instead they endlessly recombine the same three ingredients (bak — probably moringa oil, antiu — myrrh, ti-shepes — camphor) in temple and funerary contexts.

Archaeologist Dora Goldsmith and historian of science Sean Coughlin (both at Humboldt University in Berlin) experimentally reconstructed the recipe in 2018–2019, following the most complete surviving prescription, from the Byzantine physician Paul of Aegina: the oil was cold-macerated with the ingredients for sixty days, then heated, resin was added, and the mixture was stirred for a further seven days. The resulting scent — spicy, with a base note of freshly ground myrrh and cinnamon — held its intensity for almost two years. It was exhibited in Washington at the National Geographic Museum as part of the Queens of Egypt exhibition (2019). The archaeological team is now also investigating a workshop for producing scent bottles right in Mendes/Tell Timai, where more than twenty ceramic kilns operated during the Hellenistic period and where perfume bottles made up over forty percent of the ordinary pottery found in the production layer — strong evidence that this really was a manufacturing site, not a residential quarter.

An expedition to a land no one can quite find

Around 1470 BC, in the ninth year of her reign, Queen Hatshepsut sent a maritime expedition to the land of Punt — and had it recorded in reliefs on the walls of her mortuary temple at Deir el-Bahri. The inscription describes ships "laden very heavily with the marvels of the land of Punt: all the goodly fragrant woods of God's Land, heaps of myrrh resin, with fresh myrrh trees, with ebony and pure ivory, with green gold of Emu, with cinnamon wood, khesyt wood, with ihmut and sonter incense, eye cosmetic, with monkeys, baboons, dogs and skins of the southern panther." The relief shows four Puntites carrying trays of incense, and two groups of four Egyptians carrying live myrrh trees slung on poles — not just resin, then, but whole trees, root ball and all, meant to be planted back home in Egypt. It is one of the oldest detailed pictorial records of a trade expedition in the whole of history.

The one problem is that nobody knows exactly where Punt lay. The nineteenth century placed it on the Somali coast; from the 1970s the prevailing view held it was the Eritrean coast of the Red Sea; other scholars have proposed southern Sudan, northern Ethiopia, or the Arabian Peninsula. The most recent evidence is, surprisingly, hairy — literally. A team led by Nathaniel Dominy analysed oxygen and strontium isotopes in the tooth enamel, bones and fur of mummified sacred baboons (the species Papio hamadryas) from the British Museum and from the baboon catacomb at North Saqqara (eLife, 2020). The enamel of one of the animals studied (specimen EA6738) showed a different isotopic signature from its later-forming bones — meaning the baboon was born outside Egypt and only arrived in Egypt later. The combined isotope data points to a region covering much of present-day Ethiopia, Eritrea and Djibouti, and parts of Somalia and Yemen — a conclusion the authors say "supports the dominant view that Punt was located in the Horn of Africa region."

A more recent study went further still: a team led by Franziska Grathwol analysed mitochondrial DNA from a mummified baboon found at Gabbanat el-Qurud (dated to 800–540 BC) and fourteen other museum specimens (eLife, 2023). The animal's genetic subgroup turned out to be closest to samples from Eritrea and northeastern Sudan — from which the authors infer that the port of Adulis, on the Eritrean coast, may essentially have been the same trading hub as the older Punt, just in a different historical era. The question remains open, but the circle is slowly tightening: the first suspects were monkey passengers, not people.

Four thousand years, one obsession

From Neolithic embalming wrappings, through temple incense, to Cleopatra's own perfumery handbook circulated under her name (Cleopatra's Cosmetic, still mentioned in Byzantine medical texts) — Egypt's obsession with scent runs through the whole of its dynastic history and never once weakened. Unlike in Larsa, where scent was a line item in an inventory ledger, in Egypt scent was theology: smoke rising to the gods, oil that bound the dead to eternity, a recipe that survived three thousand years carved into stone because it was too sacred to be allowed to disappear.

Series on ancient perfumery: part 0 — Tappūtī, the first recorded perfumer · part 1 — Mesopotamia: trade in ancient Larsa · part 3 — Greece: Delos and Theophrastus

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Further reading: Rageot et al., "Biomolecular analyses enable new insights into ancient Egyptian embalming," Nature 614 (2023); Jones, Higham, Buckley et al., PLOS ONE (August 2014) on the origins of embalming; Littman, Silverstein, Goldsmith, Coughlin and Mashaly, "Eau de Cleopatra: Mendesian Perfume and Tell Timai," Near Eastern Archaeology 84.3 (2021) — the most comprehensive source available on kyphi, the Mendesian scent, and the excavations at Tell Timai, including the experimental reconstruction of the recipe; Dominy et al., eLife (2020) and Grathwol et al., eLife (2023) on the isotopic and genetic localisation of the land of Punt.