Ancient cosmetics from Kazakhstan carry aromatic oils that point to Silk Road trade

Two small pieces of white chalk, pulled from women’s graves east of the Aral Sea, turn out to have held hundreds of organic compounds. Chemists reading those residues found the signature of cinnamon and wormwood, with a weaker hint of mint, in objects buried roughly 1,800 years ago. The authors argue the chalk was once mixed with fragrant oils to make a cosmetic powder.

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The oils are the interesting part, because cinnamon does not grow on the Central Asian steppe. If the identification holds, an ingredient from South Asia reached the lower Syr Darya in a form that someone then ground into a grave offering for a woman in her thirties.

Two burials in the lower Syr Darya

The samples belong to the Jetyasar culture, which developed in the eastern Aral Sea region of present-day Kazakhstan. The Kazakh archaeology portal’s entry on the Zhetyasar complex describes fortified hillforts surrounded by cemeteries of hundreds or thousands of mounds, an economy built on flood irrigation, grazing and fishing, and finds of Chinese and Iranian silks, Parthian and Sassanian gems and glass beads that signal long-distance contact. UNESCO’s preliminary list has carried the Zhetyasar monuments since 2012 as part of the serial Silk Road nomination.

The two burials in the new study date to the 2nd to 4th centuries AD, and the women inside were between 30 and 39 when they died. The pieces were excavated between 1986 and 1991 and are held by the State Museum of Oriental Art, according to HeritageDaily’s November 1 write-up. Both are compressed lumps of a pale, chalky substance, and one still gave off a noticeable aroma when it was examined, which is what first suggested the material was more than a lump of mineral.

Chalk chemistry from the burials

The paper, titled “Cosmetic powder of 2000-years old Jetyasar culture. A complex analytical study,” appeared in npj Heritage Science on October 17. Its authors, led by corresponding authors A. T. Lebedev and M. B. Mednikova, combined gas chromatography-mass spectrometry with X-ray fluorescence, scanning electron microscopy, micro-Raman spectroscopy and X-ray diffraction. The base turned out to be natural chalk, and under the microscope it contained coccoliths, the tiny calcite plates shed by marine algae, which the team reads as evidence that the chalk came from local deposits rather than from a distant source.

The chalk base also separates the Jetyasar powder from better-known recipes. The researchers noted that Chinese white cosmetics of the period leaned on ingredients such as powdered freshwater pearls, while Egyptian and Roman formulas studied so far show no match for a chalk-and-aromatics blend. They called the Jetyasar recipe unique, with no known parallels among the cosmetics analysed to date.

Past the chalk, the gas chromatography pulled out more than 300 organic compounds, and the team concentrated on terpenes and related molecules typical of plant essential oils, according to a Kun.uz report on the study. Some of the signal almost certainly reflects contamination and breakdown over centuries in the ground, a limit the authors acknowledge. The pattern that survives the filtering matches cinnamon and wormwood most clearly.

Why cinnamon points to the Silk Road

Wormwood grows across the Central Asian steppe and could have been gathered locally, so its presence says little about trade. Cinnamon and mint were different. According to HeritageDaily’s account, those two were not native to the region and may have come from India. The abstract goes further and proposes that the cosmetics were made from local chalk mixed with aromatic oils imported from India. Kun.uz adds that cassia, a cinnamon relative, could instead have arrived from China, so the exact route stays open.

A Russian-language summary in Snob stresses the caution built into the result. Similar compounds occur in several plants, evidence for mint is weaker than for the other two, and the researchers could not confirm the exact purpose of the product or the origin of its ingredients. They also suggest, without claiming proof, that women buried with such a powder may have held a privileged position, since an imported fragrance would not have been cheap.

The local climate adds weight to the import reading. The Aral region is unsuitable for many aromatic plants, so a scented cosmetic with cinnamon oil in it implies that someone moved a perishable, valuable commodity across thousands of kilometres of desert and steppe, and that a household on the Syr Darya delta could afford it. That fits the silk, gems and glass already found at Jetyasar sites.

What stays unproven

No one can reconstruct the scent, and the burials were looted, so the objects were found out of context. Similar chalk pieces have turned up alongside mirrors, combs and other grooming items, which supports a cosmetic or perfume reading, but how the powder was applied remains a guess. The open question the paper leaves is whether the cinnamon travelled as oil, as bark or as a finished blend, a point further analysis of other Jetyasar graves could test.

This article was produced with the assistance of AI and reviewed by Morning Overview editors prior to publication.

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