What Nine Egyptian Mummies Actually Smell Like

Nine Bodies, One Instrument Nobody Had Pointed at Them

Every museum with an Egyptological collection has always known its mummified bodies have a smell. Curators mention it. Conservators work around it. Visitors occasionally ask about it in a way that makes clear they expected something worse, or something better. None of that is data. A smell described only in conversation cannot be compared across a room, across a museum, or across a century of conservation treatments, because there is no shared vocabulary and no instrument reading behind any of it.

The 2025 study fixes that gap for nine specific bodies in the Egyptian Museum in Cairo, chosen deliberately to span two different conservation histories: five kept in storage, largely undisturbed, and four standing in gallery display cases that the museum actively treats against insect damage [1]. The bodies range from the New Kingdom, more than three thousand years old, through the Late Period and into the Byzantine era of Roman Egypt — different embalming traditions, different resin recipes, different centuries of decay, all sitting a few rooms apart in the same building.

The question the team asked was not "does it smell bad." It was narrower and more answerable: what specific volatile molecules leave these bodies, and does a trained human nose describe those molecules the same way a chemist's instrument would sort them?

Why a Smell Needed Two Separate Instruments

A gas chromatograph-mass spectrometer (GC-MS) is extraordinarily good at telling you what molecules are present in a sample and roughly how much of each. It is completely indifferent to whether any of them smell like anything. Plenty of compounds a GC-MS reports in exhaustive detail are odorless at the concentrations found; plenty of others are detectable by a human nose at concentrations far below what the instrument can even reliably quantify. Chemical abundance and perceptual importance are not the same axis, and a paper that only ran a standard GC-MS would have a compound list with no way to say which entries actually built the smell a visitor perceives.

The fix, standard in flavor and fragrance chemistry since at least the 1960s, is to route the column's output to two detectors at once: the mass spectrometer, which identifies the molecule, and a sniffing port, where a trained human describes what just came out at that exact retention time [2]. That combined technique is gas chromatography-olfactometry, GC-MS-O for short. It is the only way to know, of the dozens of compounds a chromatogram reports, which handful are actually doing the smelling.

What the "Sniffer" Actually Does

The paper's GC-MS-O work ran as four replicate analyses per mummified body, split across two institutions, Kraków University of Economics and the University of Ljubljana [1]. At each institution a trained assessor sits at the sniffing port as the separated compounds elute one by one, seconds apart, and for each one records three things in real time: a quality descriptor (what it smells like), an intensity, and a pleasantness rating. The mass spectrometer, reading the same column split, tells the researchers what molecule was eluting at that second. Match the two streams by retention time and you get a compound with a name and a smell attached to it at once, rather than a compound list and a vague verbal impression of the sample sitting in two separate documents.

Figure 1 lays out the two parallel tracks the paper actually ran — the instrumented one, which identifies molecules and flags which of them are odor-active, and the human-panel one, which independently assigns fixed descriptor words to the sample as a whole. The interesting result of the paper is where those two tracks agree.

Getting the Air Without Touching Anyone

Every sampling step in the study was designed to avoid physical contact with the remains. Two complementary headspace techniques did the work. Solid-phase microextraction, SPME, is passive: a fiber coated in an absorbent polymer is suspended in the air inside the coffin or display case and left to equilibrate, pulling volatile molecules onto its surface simply by sitting there. Sorbent-tube sampling is active: a small pump draws a measured volume of that same air through a tube packed with adsorbent material, trapping compounds as the air passes [1]. The two methods have different biases — passive sampling favors whatever reaches equilibrium fastest, active sampling can pull a larger and more representative volume through in a fixed time — and running both against the same headspace lets the analysis cross-check itself rather than trusting one extraction chemistry alone.

Nothing in this protocol involves opening a wrapping, touching a body, or removing any material from the remains. The signal is entirely airborne: whatever has already evaporated into the enclosed space around the body over the centuries, sampled without disturbing anything the embalmers or the original burial left behind.

The nine bodies as tabulated in the paper: location, archaeological period where reported, and conservation condition score on the paper's own 0 (worst) to 8 (best) scale [1]. Periods left blank in the source table are shown blank here rather than guessed.

Thirteen Words, and Which Three Kept Coming Back

The sensory side of the study did not let panelists describe a sample however they liked. That would make nine independent free-text descriptions impossible to compare. Instead the panel worked from a fixed vocabulary of thirteen descriptors, developed and agreed on in training: spicy, woody, moldy, stale/rancid, sweet, ethereal, resin-like, citrus-like, floral, dusty, herbal, incense-like, and smoky [1]. For each mummified body the panel rated how strongly each applicable descriptor applied, scored overall intensity on a 0-to-10 scale, and rated the hedonic tone — how pleasant or unpleasant the smell was, not just how strong.

Across all nine bodies, three descriptors dominated: woody, spicy, and sweet. Figure 2 gives the exact frequencies. Average perceived intensity across the set was rated medium, with body M3 the least intense of the nine, and average hedonic tone came out as slightly pleasant — a genuinely unexpected result for anyone who assumed "smell of a three-thousand-year-old corpse" defaults to unpleasant.

Woody, Spicy, Sweet: What the Chemistry Behind Each Word Actually Is

A descriptor word is not an explanation until it is tied back to a molecule, and this is where GC-MS-O earns its keep. The paper's chemical analysis groups the identified volatiles into four sources, and the largest by far traces directly to the embalming process itself and to what has happened to it over three millennia.

A family of terpenoid compounds — α-pinene, d-limonene, l-verbenone, borneol — points to the resins the embalmers actually used: cedar, pine and juniper resins, myrrh, and frankincense, all long documented as embalming ingredients and all naturally rich in exactly these terpenes [1, 3]. That family alone accounts for most of the woody, spicy, and resin-like descriptors the panel kept assigning. Two lactones, γ-decalactone and γ-octalactone, gave a distinctive sweet, fruity note and were detected uniquely in body M9 — the same body that also carries the highest conservation condition score in the set. Degradation adds its own layer on top of the original recipe: acetic acid and furfural mark ongoing breakdown of wood and cellulose in coffins and wrappings, while 2(5H)-furanone and vanillin are classic markers of lignin breaking down over time. Benzoic acid, octanoic acid, p-cresol, and (E)-cinnamaldehyde round out the list, and a set of phenolic compounds turned up specifically in the display-case air rather than in storage [1].

None of this required the chemists to guess. Terpenoid and lactone signatures like these are well characterized in the archaeological-chemistry literature on mummification balms, going back to foundational GC-MS work on embalming agents recovered directly from wrapped tissue [3]. What is new here is not the chemistry of the resin — it is putting a trained nose on the same air and confirming that the compounds a mass spectrometer reports are the same compounds a human being would call "woody" and "sweet" without being told what was in the sample.

The Compounds That Have Nothing To Do With Ancient Egypt

The more surprising part of the compound list is everything that is not three thousand years old. Three further categories showed up, and none of them came from the embalming workshop.

The Egyptian Museum treats its display cases with a natural pest-control oil, a blend of clove, camphor, peppermint, basil, lemon, orange, and cinnamon oils, applied to protect the mummified bodies on show from insect damage [1]. That treatment leaves its own chemical fingerprint — eugenol, octanol, and more α-pinene, this time from clove and camphor rather than from resin. Separately, and without any documented treatment record explaining it, the four gallery bodies also carried synthetic pesticide residues that the mass spectrometer could identify but that were, for the most part, odorless at the concentrations found — present in the chemistry, invisible to the panel. And finally, live biology: octanal, nonanal, and a cluster of eight-carbon compounds including 1-octen-3-ol and 3-octanol — volatiles produced by actively metabolizing fungi and bacteria, matched by microbiological swab testing to species including Aspergillus niger, Penicillium chrysogenum, Cladosporium cladosporioides, and several Bacillus species [1]. The stale/rancid descriptor the panel used in a third of the bodies traces to this fourth category, not to the mummy itself.

Where Each Category Actually Turns Up

Location in the museum is not incidental to which of the four categories a sample carries. Pest oil and the unexplained synthetic pesticide residues both track the same four bodies — M6 through M9, the ones on public display and the ones the museum actively treats. Storage bodies M1 through M5 carry none of either. The resin-and-degradation category, by contrast, is universal: every one of the nine bodies embalmed with these materials still carries some part of that signature, storage or gallery, because it is intrinsic to what was done to the body rather than to where the body has since been kept. The paper also reports, more generally, that displayed bodies showed a greater variety and a higher concentration of compounds overall than the storage bodies, which the authors attribute to volatiles accumulating inside the semi-enclosed display cases rather than dispersing the way they might in open storage [1]. A hierarchical cluster analysis of the full chemical profiles grouped the nine bodies by archaeological period, conservation treatment, and material composition — meaning the chemistry alone, without anyone knowing which body was which, sorted itself along lines an archaeologist would recognize.

Whose Nose, and Whose Consent

The paper does not treat the ethics of this work as an afterthought tacked onto a chemistry study; it is built into the title and argued through in its own right. The authors state plainly that "any study of human remains necessitates consideration of ethical implications, given their significance to the originating communities" [1]. That is a direct acknowledgment that a mummified body is not simply a chemistry sample that happens to be old — it is a person, and decisions about how that person's remains are studied, displayed, and, in this case, smelled by strangers carry a weight that a jar of ancient resin does not.

The paper situates itself inside a longer-running tension in museum practice: increased public scrutiny has pushed heritage scholars to look for a balance between respecting the human body and giving visitors a genuinely informative experience, and the authors note explicitly that other recent studies of human remains have provoked mixed public reactions, which is exactly why communicating the ethical framework a study operates under matters as much as the results themselves [1]. That tension has its own scholarly literature outside this paper — the question of whether, and how, museums should display human remains at all has been argued directly by heritage researchers for close to two decades [4].

Two concrete choices in the study's design read as direct responses to that tension. First, nothing about the sampling touches the remains: headspace air, not tissue, wrapping, or bone. Second, the study explicitly involves local stakeholders — workers at the Egyptian Museum in Cairo — rather than treating the collection purely as a resource for outside researchers to extract data from, which the authors frame as supporting the "social sustainability" of the heritage in question [1].

What the Paper Actually Recommends Museums Do

A study like this earns its ethics section by turning findings into practice, and the paper does that in four concrete ways.

The most immediately actionable is a health and safety finding: the identification of synthetic pesticide residues on the display bodies means specific handling guidelines can now be written for the people who actually work near these cases every day, and the paper suggests that bodies carrying such residues could be placed in separate display arrangements if warranted [1]. Second, the authors argue for treating the smell itself as heritage worth preserving deliberately, not as an unfortunate side effect to be masked or ventilated away — "the olfactory heritage should be preserved as an integral part of the mummified body's significance." Third is a specific, low-cost storage recommendation: keeping mummified bodies in display cases rather than loose wrapping, since the case itself moderates how volatiles accumulate and disperse. Fourth is a data-management point that outlasts any one museum's current staff: systematically archiving the chemical and olfactory data collected here in repositories, so future conservators and researchers can compare against it rather than starting from nothing [1].

Where the Method Still Has Gaps

A trained sensory panel is still a small number of trained people, and the paper does not report exactly how many sat on it, which makes it hard to independently judge how much any one person's vocabulary shaped the shared descriptor list. The synthetic pesticide residues are flagged and identified but the paper does not explain, because it likely cannot from chemistry alone, when or by whom they were applied — a genuine historical gap in the museum's own conservation records rather than a limitation of the analytical method. And the four categories of compound sources are not perfectly separable in practice: a compound like α-pinene turns up in both the ancient resin and the modern pest oil, so a single detected peak of it cannot always be assigned to one source with certainty without the surrounding context of which other compounds accompany it.

None of that undermines the central result. It is simply the ordinary residue of doing archaeological chemistry on a sample that has been sitting in an active museum, absorbing whatever that museum has done to it, for a very long time.

What Stays With Us

The plainest way to say what this paper does is: it took something everyone in the room already knew — that these bodies have a smell — and built an instrument path from that private sensory fact to a shared, citable, chemically grounded one. Woody, spicy, sweet is not a poetic flourish. It is what α-pinene, verbenone, and a pair of lactones actually smell like to a trained nose, confirmed independently by a mass spectrometer that has no opinion about poetry at all. And underneath that three-thousand-year-old signature sits a second, much younger one: clove oil from 2021, pesticide nobody has a record of applying, and fungi that are, right now, still metabolizing. A museum case is not a sealed vessel. It has its own chemistry, made partly by the people who work there today, and this paper is one of the first times anyone pointed an instrument at all of it at once.

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