Scientists Recreate Cleopatra's Favorite Perfume [View all]
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 isnt usually included in the equation.
Now thats slowly changingand 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 isnt as easy as it might seem.
Archaeologists Robert Littman and Jay Silverstein, both from the University of Hawaii, 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/