Scents of Arabia: Interdisciplinary Approaches to Ancient Olfactory Worlds

Arnulf Hausleiter is a Near Eastern archaeologist and scientific officer for the archaeology of the Arabian Peninsula at the Orient Department of the German Archaeological Institute (DAI), Berlin, Germany. His scientific research focuses on the archaeology and environment of the oases in north-western Arabia, their networks and socio-cultural practices.Barbara Huber is post-doctoral researcher at the Bonn Center for ArchaeoSciences, University of Bonn, and the Max Planck Institute of Geoanthropology in Jena, Germany. She specializes in biomolecular archaeology and metabolomics, exploring the role of scents, plants, and organic residues in ancient cultural and environmental practices.

• Guidelines and TransliterationPrefaceTitles of papers read at the Seminar for Arabian Studies special session ‘Scents of Arabia: Interdisciplinary Approaches to Ancient Olfactory Worlds’New dimensions of interdisciplinary research on ancient scents and incense in Arabia – Arnulf Hausleiter and Barbara Huber‘Aššur, accept! Aššur, listen!’ Connecting Arabia and Assyria through aromatics and olfaction – Kiersten NeumannAššurbanipal’s bdellium: revisiting Commiphora wightii in the Persian Gulf – Sureshkumar MuthukumaranThe identifications of incenses: lessons learned in the organic analyses in the Mediterranean and the Levant – Elisabeth DodinetExploring the aromatic diversity of incense materials at the ancient oasis of Taymāʾ using metabolic profiling – Barbara Huber, Arnulf Hausleiter, Michèle Dinies, Muhammad H. Al-Najem, Majed T.F. Alonazy, Ina Säumel, Daniel Giddings Vassão, Ricardo Fernandes, Nicole Boivin, Patrick Roberts and Thi Lam Huong Pham The archaeological and ethnographic heritage of portable incense burner production in Dhofar, the southern Arabian Peninsula – William Gerard ZimmerleOutlook: the scents of Arabia – a ‘nose-on’ approach – Sofia Collette EhrichList of contributors