Aromas of Antiquity: The Fragrant World of the Ancient Mediterranean

Have you ever wondered how something as unassuming as smell can shape entire civilizations? Through scent walks, hands-on experiences, and chemical experiments, students in this course will discover how fragrance shapes our daily lives and contemporary ideas about medicine, relationships, and wealth. We’ll then shift to the ancient Mediterranean, exploring how the ancient Egyptians, Mesopotamians, Early Christians, Greeks, and Romans perceived scent and examining its entanglement with their belief systems, social lives, and power dynamics.