Scientists Recreate Cleopatra's Favorite Perfume

Reconstructing the scentscapes of bygone civilizations is anything but simple

Jane Recker
Daily Correspondent

May 23, 2022 2:40 p.m.



Researchers want to recreate the smells of civilizations like ancient Egypt. Photo by AMIR MAKAR/AFP via Getty Images


Bit by bit, modern researchers are helping reveal what living in ancient societies looked and felt like. But though those studies emphasize taste, as in a cooking museum in Italy that recreates ancient Roman dishes, and sound, as in another that recreated how Stonehenge would have amplified voices and music, smell isn’t usually included in the equation.

Now that’s slowly changing—and scientists are slowly starting to uncover, and recreate, the scentscape of the ancient world. That includes engineering a perfume thought to be used by Cleopatra, the female pharaoh who ruled Egypt between 51 and 30 B.C.E.

But, as ScienceNews’ Bruce Bower reports, actually determining which ingredients made up real ancient perfumes isn’t as easy as it might seem.

Archaeologists Robert Littman and Jay Silverstein, both from the University of Hawai’i, uncovered a perfume factory outside of Mendes in 2012 filled with perfume bottles and amphorae containing perfume residue. The pair asked the other authors, Dora Goldsmith, a Berlin-based Egyptologist, and Sean Coughlin, a Prague-based professor of Greek and Roman philosophy, to use “experimental archaeology” to try to recreate the perfume produced there.

More:
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/scientists-recreated-cleopatra-favorite-perfume-180980126/