But there are many nasal complexities to negotiate – as [Cecilia] Bembibre points out: “It is really hard to get the information you need to bring back smells.” Her own chemical work has reproduced the scent of a 1750s potpourri at Knole – the ancestral home of the Sackville-West family in Kent – a description of which appears in Virginia Woolf’s novel Orlando.

She has also reproduced the smell of the library at St Paul’s Cathedral in London by extracting detectable elements from the air in 2017, before it was refurbished. She then invited a specialist perfumer, Sarah McCartney, to attempt to create the same olfactory experience based only on her instincts about its components.

— Read more in A nose for history: academics recreate lost smells from the past at The Guardian.

[Egyptologist Dora] Goldsmith has documented Greco-Roman sources consistently listing four ingredients for Mendesian perfume: myrrh, cassia, resin and oil of balanos (most academics believe this is a species of moringa, others desert date oil). Some accounts also mention cinnamon. [...]

“The way Greeks treated Egyptian recipes was very flexible. They retained some ingredients, but they also changed a lot. The study of how perfume recipes changed from the Egyptians to the Greeks can be referred to as transmission of knowledge in perfumery.”

— Read more in Exploring the forgotten scents of ancient Egypt at Middle East Eye.

Changes are in the air, though. Some archaeologists are sniffing out odor molecules from artifacts found at dig sites and held in museums. Others are poring over ancient texts for references to perfume recipes, and have even cooked up a scent much like one presumably favored by Cleopatra. In studying and reviving scents of the past, these researchers aim to understand how ancient people experienced, and interpreted, their worlds through smell.

— Read more in Ancient ‘smellscapes’ are wafting out of artifacts and old texts at ScienceNews.

Spices were imported from all over the world to Mendes, [University of Hawaii professor Robert] Littman said, including from India, Arabia and Africa, making Mendes a major center of the perfume trade from about 300 B.C. to about 800 A.D.

During the third century B.C., the ancient city of Thmouis produced a perfume, which was named after the main city and called the Mendesian perfume. That’s the one Littman considers to be the “Chanel No. 5” of late antiquity – Cleopatra’s perfume.

— Read more in The Archeology Of Smell: Behind This UH Professor’s Ongoing Quest For Cleopatra’s Perfume at Honolulu Civil Beat.