In 2003, a team of archaeologists were digging in Cyprus.

Cyprus is known in mythology as the home of Aphrodite,

the goddess of love, known for her prowess in the seductive arts.

And they sat out along the south side of this hill.

And on the side of the hill, they started uncovering this really large sort of industrial site from, I think it was 1850 or something like that, B.C.E.

And in this industrial site, they found remnants of all this different kinds of production,

olive oil production, copper production, and then attached to the olive oil production

a perfume creation facility.

That is Saskia Wilson Brown.

She's the founder of the Institute of Art and Olfaction. It's a nonprofit she started to help expand access and education around Cent.

So what they were seeing were jars and accutraments, you know, different things that people would have used at the time to make perfume,

like Amphra, bottles, basins, pitchers, stuff like that.

So this connection to Aphrodite and scent,

which is supported in Greek mythology and aphrodisiacs

in different practices, I think that's what's really cool about this particular find

is that connection. I'm Delantheras and this is Atlas Obscira, a celebration of the world's strange, incredible, and wondrous

smells.

Specific smells have been linked to geographies, cultures, mythologies for

thousands of years and today we talk to Saskia about fragrance fragrance, about power, about the relationship between those two.

And along the way, we get the gossip on what Napoleon smelled like and talk about how

constipated whales became a part of the perfume industry.

All of that after this. And the You're going to be here. Smell is arguably the oldest biological sense there is. And there is just this huge part of the human brain

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