Spring begins with Jang Beom-jun's song "Cherry Blossom Ending." As the spring breeze blows and cherry blossom petals scatter, two people walk down a street where the sound will spread. But as always, love changes. Now it's the time of "among the swaying flowers, I caught the scent of your shampoo." I keep looking back, but that person is nowhere to be seen. Only the memory of the scent is etched in the brain.
Scientists say the sense of smell is the most primitive sense. It connects directly to the amygdala and hippocampus, which govern emotion and memory, without passing through the thalamus that processes sensory information. That is why memories evoked by smell are vivid and stir emotions. The shampoo scent that brushes past the tip of the nose recalls an old love, and the savory smell of cheonggukjang brings back one's mother.
The revival of memories by scent is called the "Proust phenomenon." On a winter's day, French writer Marcel Proust dipped a madeleine into black tea and, the moment he took a bite, recalled the scent of madeleines he had tasted in his hometown as a child. The memories of home that unfolded in Proust's mind gave birth to his masterpiece "In Search of Lost Time."
Now science is recreating even the scents of ages so distant that there are no memories at all. By restoring the scents of forgotten times, it is realizing time travel through smell. The scent from ancient Egyptian mummies and the perfume Cleopatra sprayed when she tried to seduce the Roman general Antony have been recreated by the power of science. So have the beer people drank 5,000 years ago and the scent of a flower that went extinct in Hawaii. The Proust phenomenon is crossing the barriers of time and space.
Biomolecular archaeology restores Egypt's fragrance
In 2022, Barbara Huber of Germany's Max Planck Institute proposed a biomolecular archaeology technique to recover ancient scents in the international journal Nature Human Behaviour. Researchers collect trace amounts of organic compounds from pottery unearthed at archaeological sites, cloth that wrapped mummies, and even dental calculus from mummies. The goal is to find traces of spices or oils used by ancient people.
Next comes the process of finding a chemical fingerprint using gas chromatography, which analyzes gaseous components. The organic compounds are heated into a gas and passed through a specially made long column. The components that make up the compounds separate according to their molecular weights and chemical properties because their migration speeds differ. An electron beam is then fired at each separated molecule to fragment it, and its mass is measured.
Mass patterns differ for each substance, like human fingerprints. These are compared with databases cataloging materials used by people of the time to identify the components. For example, if cedrol is detected in a given sample, it means cedar was used, and if cinnamic aldehyde appears, cinnamon was likely included. When combined with pollen analyses from the site where the sample was taken, researchers can learn not only what scents were present but also which plants were mixed and in what proportions.
The following year, Huber reported in Scientific Reports that she had restored the scent of embalming agents used to make Egyptian mummies in the 15th century B.C. through biomolecular archaeology. From the canopic jars of Senetnay, a noblewoman who served as a wet nurse during the 18th Dynasty, came an unexpectedly subtle fragrance, like freshly laid road tar mixed with a forest aroma. Tar components for sterilization were blended with a heavy resinous scent.
Surprisingly, the resins from the Egyptian jars originated only in Southeast Asia or the Himalayas. Scent revealed the trade routes of ancient Egypt. The scent Huber reconstructed is offered alongside the canopic jars displayed at the Moesgaard Museum in Denmark. Visitors can take a time trip to ancient Egypt through smell by sniffing paper cards infused with the mummy embalming mixture.
A research team at the University of Hawaii in the United States used the same method to recreate a perfume believed to have been used by Cleopatra. They analyzed residues left in jars from a perfume factory site in Egypt dating to 300 B.C. Cross-checking with ancient texts showed that perfumes then were made by blending myrrh, a resin component, with cinnamon, the spice cardamom, and olive oil. Today's alcohol-based perfumes evaporate easily, but Egyptian perfume, a viscous oil, held an intense, spicy scent for a long time.
Olfactory records are recognized as cultural heritage
University College London (UCL) opened an exhibition on Mar. 26 to mark the university's 200th anniversary. Professor Matija Strlic and Dr. Cecilia Bembibre unveiled the scent of the library at St. Paul's Cathedral in London for the show. The library holds ancient books dating back to the 12th century. The two restored the musty yet sweet aroma emanating from the volumes.
The UCL team collected scent compounds from books and analyzed them with gas chromatography. At the same time, they invited seven professional "noses" to the library and asked them to describe the scent using 21 adjectives. The words people used to describe the aromas help assess the condition of the paper. Paper that has become acidic through decay smells sweeter, while stable paper smells more like hay. The team also recreated and displayed the interior scent of the late Queen Elizabeth's car for the exhibition.
Scientists believe biomolecular archaeology can change the concept of museum exhibitions. Combining sight and smell can deepen immersion. To that end, the European Union (EU) carried out the three-year Odeuropa project through 2023 to compile Europe's olfactory heritage.
European scientists collected about 220,000 smell-related documents and about 4,700 visual materials from the 1600s to the 1920s. Artificial intelligence (AI) uses this information to suggest recipes to recreate past scents. Even scents that existed only in the imagination were recognized as heritage. Scientists even recreated the smell of hell described in a 16th-century church sermon as brimstone and the stench of millions of dead dogs.
Odeuropa drew inspiration from Japan. In 2001, Japan's Environment Ministry announced 100 representative Japanese scents, ranging from the floral aroma of Nomozaki Narcissus Park in Nagasaki Prefecture and the sweet white peaches of Okayama Prefecture to the Korean food aromas of Tsuruhashi, an Osaka neighborhood with a large community of ethnic Koreans. Olfactory assets are now being treated as cultural heritage.
Extinct flower scents revived by cutting-edge biology
Life sciences have also played a role in reviving scent memories. Ginkgo Bioworks, a biotechnology company in Boston, developed a perfume capturing the scent of a flower that went extinct in 1912 on Maui, Hawaii, using advanced biotechnology. Founded in 2009, the company specializes in Synthetic Biology. Synthetic Biology is a field of research that modifies the genes of organisms to optimize them for producing specific substances.
The process of restoring the scent of an extinct flower resembles the method for resurrecting dinosaurs in a movie. In the film, DNA was extracted from the blood of a Cretaceous mosquito trapped in amber. That DNA was combined with frog DNA to create dinosaurs. Ginkgo extracted DNA from dried herbarium specimens of extinct plants kept in science museums, then identified the genes that produce scent. They inserted these into yeast to mass-produce the aromatic compounds.
Yeast is a microorganism that ferments beer. Scientists even used yeast to restore the aroma of ancient beer. In 2019, Israeli researchers isolated six dormant yeast strains from pottery shards excavated at 5,000-year-old sites and brewed beer. They awakened the microorganisms that once made alcohol to recreate the aroma of ancient beer. There had been earlier attempts to reproduce ancient beer, but they were merely chemical imitations.
Earlier, Patrick McGovern of the University of Pennsylvania recreated the beer that King Midas drank in the 8th century B.C. In Greek mythology, Midas is recorded as the figure whose touch turned everything into gold. For Midas' beer, researchers analyzed residues in bronze vessels from the tomb to identify the ingredients used in the beer of the time, but the yeast used for fermentation was modern.
Isn't it time for Korea to integrate its olfactory heritage into museums as well? Recently, the National Museum of Korea has emerged as a must-visit attraction for foreigners. The surging popularity of the Netflix animation "K-Pop Demon Hunters," set in Korea, has carried over to the museum's appeal. The scent of the 1,500-year-old afterlife of the Tomb of King Muryeong, or the aromas of a Joseon royal banquet shaped by Dae Jang Geum's touch, would be well worth restoring.
References
Frontiers in Environmental Archaeology (2026), DOI: https://doi.org/10.3389/fearc.2025.1736875
Scientific Reports (2023), DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-023-39393-y
Nature Human Behaviour (2022), DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41562-022-01325-7
Nature Biotechnolgy (2021), DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/d41587-021-00016-4
Near Eastern Archaeology (2021), DOI: https://doi.org/10.1086/715345
mBio (2019), DOI: https://doi.org/10.1128/mbio.00388-19
Heritage Science (2017), DOI: https://doi.org/10.1186/s40494-016-0114-1