Humans are very smell conscious.

Longish and interesting.

https://www.sciencenews.org/article/ancient-smell-odor-artifacts-texts-egypt-archaeology
Ancient ‘smellscapes’ are wafting out of artifacts and old texts
ID’ing odor molecules and brewing Cleopatra’s perfume are part of new research on past scents

Ramses VI faced a smelly challenge when he became Egypt’s king in
1145 B.C. The new pharaoh’s first job was to rid the land of the stench
of fish and birds, denizens of the Nile Delta’s fetid swamps.

That, at any rate, was the instruction in a hymn written to Ramses VI
upon his ascension to the throne. Some smells, it seems, were
considered far worse than others in the land of the pharaohs.

Surviving written accounts indicate that, perhaps unsurprisingly,
residents of ancient Egyptian cities encountered a wide array of nice
and nasty odors. Depending on the neighborhood, citizens inhaled
smells of sweat, disease, cooking meat, incense, trees and flowers.
Egypt’s hot weather heightened demand for perfumed oils and
ointments that cloaked bodies in pleasant smells.

“The written sources demonstrate that ancient Egyptians lived in a
rich olfactory world,” says Egyptologist Dora Goldsmith of Freie
Universität Berlin. A full grasp of ancient Egyptian culture requires a comprehensive examination of how pharaohs and their subjects
made sense of their lives through smell, she contends. No such
study has been conducted.

Archaeologists have traditionally studied visible objects.
Investigations have reconstructed what ancient buildings looked
like based on excavated remains and determined how people
lived by analyzing their tools, personal ornaments and other
tangible finds.

Rare projects have re-created what people may have heard
thousands of years ago at sites such as Stonehenge (SN: 8/31/20).
Piecing together, much less re-creating, the olfactory landscapes,
or smellscapes, of long-ago places has attracted even less scholarly
curiosity. Ancient cities in Egypt and elsewhere have been presented
as “colorful and monumental, but odorless and sterile,” Goldsmith
says.

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