Divinity Atlas

Sacred Correspondences
Articles

What an Unidentified Ingredient Tells You

Citation Formats

General Reference

APA Style

BibTeX

Learn More
What an Unidentified Ingredient Tells You

The onycha problem is a useful specimen of how much of ancient religious material culture is unrecoverable, and how quickly. The temple stood; the incense was compounded daily by a named family; the ingredients were written down in scripture and elaborated in the Talmud. And within a few centuries of the destruction, the second name on a four-item list could no longer be matched to a substance.

Part of the reason is that ancient aromatic names are trade names rather than botanical ones. They travel with the goods, they shift as the source shifts, and a name that meant one resin in the eighth century BCE can mean a substitute by the second century CE without anyone recording the change. Frankincense, myrrh, cassia, cinnamon and nard all have this problem to some degree; onycha simply has it worst.

The other part is that smell leaves no archaeology. A vessel survives, a pigment survives, a text survives. The compound that was burned in it is gone unless a residue happens to be trapped and someone thinks to analyse it, and gas chromatography of temple-period incense residues is a very small literature.

The atlas records the identification as open rather than picking one, and there is an open question filed against it. A confident answer here would be a guess dressed as a fact.

Cross-Tradition Connections

Article On

Sources
Comments (0)
No comments yet. Be the first to share a thought.
Reader Challenges (0 open reader challenges)
No disputes yet. Spotted an error or a better source? Open the first one.

View At A Past Year

The atlas records no dated fact of its own for this entry, so there is no other year to choose.