This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.
Exodus names four spices for the Tabernacle incense: stacte, onycha, galbanum and pure frankincense. The rabbis of the Talmud, working the text at tractate Keritot, read that short list as shorthand for a longer formula and arrived at eleven ingredients in total, four measured in a larger unit and seven more added in smaller amounts, ground fine and compounded together rather than burned as separate resins the way frankincense alone might be offered elsewhere.
The compounding itself was a guarded craft. The Mishnah names the house of Avtinas as the family that alone knew the technique for blending the spices so that the smoke rose in a single straight column rather than drifting, and later tradition treats their reluctance to teach the method to outsiders as a point of both pride and suspicion, since a family trade kept secret for generations sits uneasily next to a public Temple service.
What makes the recipe distinctive within the wider ancient incense trade is less any single ingredient than the insistence on all eleven together. Rabbinic teaching held that removing even one spice invalidated the whole offering, unlike a resin such as frankincense which was also burned on its own in other contexts. That completeness requirement is why the identity of every named ingredient still matters two thousand years later: a recipe that tolerates no omission cannot be honestly called reconstructed while any of its eleven names remains an open question, which is exactly the position the atlas records for the third of them, onycha.