The smell of Egyptian mummies? These museums immerse you in a multi-sensory experience

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Entering a museum means observing, reading, listening... and soon 'smelling' history's scent. Not to marvel or create a spectacle, but rather to better understand the past. Science is now able to reconstruct the smells associated with ancient objects, rituals and everyday practices, thanks to tiny chemical traces that have remained trapped in materials over the centuries.

It's a change that truly transforms the way we tell history, and paves the way for a more accessible, empathetic and engaging multi-sensory museum experience.

And it's the sense of smell itself, that most ancient of senses, that offers a new key to reading the past. A scent can reveal many things: the medical practices, religious rituals, daily habits and beliefs of civilizations that lived thousands of years ago, making a museum visit more immersive and more memorable too.

From chemical traces to ancient smells

A recent study, published in the journal Frontiers in Environmental Archaeology, shows how museums can now transform complex scientific data into sensory experiences accessible to all. At the heart of the research is biomolecular archaeology, a discipline that analyzes the chemical residues present on archaeological finds to understand what they contained and how they were used.

Based on these concrete elements, the research team was able to create scent cards and olfactory diffusion stations designed to accompany the exhibits on display. The result? A sensory journey that combines seeing and reading with the experience of smell.

As Barbara Huber, archaeo-chemist at the Max Planck Institute for Geoanthropology and the University of Tübingen, points out, this project marks a turning point in the way in which scientific research is shared and transmitted, taking it out of the laboratories and making it comprehensible and tangible even for the general public.

This dialogue between science and the public was also made possible by the coming together of different fields of expertise. Barbara Huber worked with Sofia Collette Ehrich, art historian and expert in olfactory storytelling, to bring together ancient chemistry and the study of perfume as a cultural language.

Scents from Egypt's past

Using molecular signatures derived from her research, perfumer and pharmacist Carole Calvez has developed a fragrance inspired by ancient Egyptian embalming rituals. This is not a simple copy of the original ingredients, but a complex creative process. Chemical data provide valuable clues, but it's up to the perfumer to piece it all together, transforming numbers and molecules into a coherent olfactory experience capable of evoking the complexity of the original material.

A multi-sensory experience between Germany and Denmark

This new form of sensory storytelling has already become a reality in some European museums. At the Museum August Kestner in Hanover, Germany, reconstituted perfumes have been integrated into an exhibition devoted to ancient Egypt, thanks to a portable perfume card and a fixed diffusion station.

Visitors can smell the 'Perfume of the Beyond', an olfactory card in which the essence is integrated directly into the piece of paper using scented printing techniques. According to curators Christian E. Loeben and Ulrike Dubiel, the sense of smell helps to overcome the horror-movie imagery often associated with mummification, helping visitors to understand the spiritual and ritual motivations behind these practices. The same installation was also presented at the Moesgaard Museum in Aarhus, Denmark. There, as curator Steffen Terp Laursen explained that sthe introduction of smell radically changed visitors' approach, adding an emotional depth that informative panels alone cannot offer.

According to the researchers, this experiment shows how molecular traces of the past can become meaningful cultural experiences in the present. The aim is to provide museums with innovative tools for telling history in a more inclusive, sensitive and engaging way, stimulating curiosity and awareness.

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Source : Max Planck Institute of Geoanthropology

(©GreenMe.it 2026/Managing editor: Selma Keshkire - The Press Junction/Picture: Suzi Kim via Unsplash)