What does a mummy smell like?  It’s all about the chemistry…

I can honestly say that is the first time I’ve ever asked myself that question.  I had no idea that “the scent of a mummy” was an actual science with chemistry behind it too—see this JACS paper.  The study seems to be partly understanding both the historical and archeological background of the mummies, but also an environmental study to protect the health of museum workers.  The study conducted both panel-based sensory analyses along with gas chromatography-mass spectrometry-olfactometry (GC-MS-O) methods.  A quote from the paper, which is probably the first time this has ever been written in JACS is as follows

 “Experts working with mummified bodies reported their smell mostly as hedonically pleasant with “balsamic” descriptors (“heavy”, “sweet”, “woody” odors)”. 

Now, the term hedonic tone is actually used here to describe a smell of a trained human “sniffer” as one of pleasantness.

Much of the article is a bit of a mystery to me, but what I found interesting was the compounds listed which were identified through GC-MS as part of the mummification process. 

Examples include nonanl, acetic acid, furfural, ocatonal, (E)-cinnamaldehye, 1H-pyrrole-2-carboxaldehye, 2(5H)-furanone, alpha-pinene and the list goes on.  Lots of aldehydes, but I guess that’s related to the reason why formaldehyde and glutaraldehyde are used as preservatives due to their reactivity and in the case of those examples, their cross-linking ability.

I can’t help but find a bit of humor in this, and some chemistry.   My childhood memories of mummies are the famous King Tut excavations, and of course who could forget Scooby-Doo “Where’s my Mummy?”.   And now the chemistry of mummy smells…