The Scent of Death
In October 2021, the British Museum announced that it has the earliest known image of a ghost. On this Babylonian clay tablet, a figure stands with feet on the ground and hands tied, being led into the afterlife by a female figure. We know this is a ghost because the accompanying cuneiform inscription describes that this man has come back from the dead, and includes instructions on how to exorcise his miserable spirit and untether him from this world. The ritual includes making small effigies, offering beer, and burning juniper incense at sunrise.1 Many funerary practices all over the world use smells, oils, and incenses. Our sense of smell is our most immediate sense, and most intimately tied to memory; it has the ability to tug or shove us in unexpected directions, to make us time travel to extremely specific times and places, and to soothe. It’s no wonder, then, that smell and grief have long been intertwined.
Azza El Siddique uses sacred and secular scents that for her conjure memories of home, women, and care. These scents are used in contemporary Islamic funerary practices as well as for personal enjoyment in the home, and she has even traced their use back to ancient Egyptian texts. Egyptians and Nubians believed that fragrant scents were the smells of the gods—and so, to burn incense is to be in their presence. In (2021), scents are placed in ceramic water lily vessels—the
