A timeline of incense: 5,000 years in twelve moments

Incense has been burned continuously for roughly five thousand years, and its history is not one invention but at least two independent ones, linked later by trade. The earliest evidence is Egyptian, where resin was placed on temple fires before 3000 BCE and compounded incenses such as kyphi appeared within a few centuries. A parallel tradition began in Mesoamerica by around 1200 BCE, built entirely around copal resin, with no contact between the two systems until the colonial period. Between these poles, Arabian frankincense trade supplied the ancient Mediterranean, Chinese court culture refined incense into a literary art by the Tang and Song dynasties, Japan formalized kōdō in the fifteenth century, and Islamic bakhoor spread oud-and-resin blends across the Gulf. The most recent turn, from the mid-twentieth century, is toward laboratory aroma chemicals standing in for scarce natural materials. Twelve such moments, spanning two continents and several unrelated inventions, make up the practice now called incense.

Twelve moments, one continuous practice

The table below sets the twelve moments in rough order. None replaced the one before it; most are still practiced today, often side by side.

Egypt and the Levant: temple smoke and eleven spices

Egyptian temple altars burned resin, probably from local junipers and terebinth trees, well before the practice was written down. By the Old Kingdom, Egypt was importing frankincense and myrrh from Punt, a region usually placed on the Horn of Africa or the southern Arabian coast. Kyphi is the best-documented compound incense to survive from antiquity: recipes recorded by later Greek writers describe resins steeped in wine and honey with raisins and juniper berries, formed into cakes and burned at temple closing rites.

Centuries later, the Hebrew Bible specifies an incense of the same compounded kind for the Tabernacle and later the Jerusalem Temple. The ketoret named in rabbinic sources lists eleven ingredients, including frankincense, galbanum, and two substances, stacte and onycha, whose modern botanical identity is still debated among historians. Kyphi and ketoret together show that incense was compounded, not single-note, from the earliest written record.

What did the earliest incense smell like?

Text alone cannot reconstruct a scent reliably, but the surviving ingredient lists give a rough profile. Frankincense resin, from species such as Boswellia sacra and B. carterii, burns with a bright, citrus-tinged, faintly green top note before settling into a drier, resinous base, a character driven in large part by monoterpenes such as α-pinene. Galbanum contributes a sharp, vegetal edge; myrrh and storax add a darker, balsamic warmth. Burned slowly on embers rather than open flame, a compounded incense like this would have shifted in character over the course of a rite rather than presenting one fixed note, much as a well-made incense blend still does.

China, Japan and the art of listening to incense

Incense reached Chinese court and religious life well before the common era, but it was during the Han to Song dynasties that a distinct incense culture took shape, with elaborate bronze censers, imported frankincense and benzoin arriving by sea, and blending treated as a literary as much as a devotional pursuit. Buddhist ritual practice carried incense use further across East Asia.

Japan received incense through Buddhist transmission from the sixth century, but it was in the Muromachi period, in the 1400s, that appreciation was formalized into kōdō, literally the “way of incense.” Practitioners do not smell incense in kōdō; they “listen” to it, an etiquette built around identifying agarwood grades and kneaded nerikō blends, into which benzoin is worked as a fixative and sweetener.

Mesoamerica: copal without frankincense

Independently of every Old World tradition, Mesoamerican cultures built their own incense practice around New World resins. Olmec sites show copal burning by around 1200 BCE, and the practice continued through Maya and Aztec ritual life into the present, where copaleros still tap Protium and Bursera trees and burn the resin at altars and household ceremonies. Copal’s smoke reads sharper and more turpentine-like than frankincense, reflecting a different, though overlapping, chemistry of monoterpenes and resin acids.

How did resin incense spread along trade routes?

Frankincense and myrrh moved out of southern Arabia and the Horn of Africa by camel caravan and by sea to Egypt, the Levant, Greece and Rome, a trade lucrative enough to shape the geography of ancient Yemen and Oman. Centuries later, benzoin followed a comparable route in reverse: overland and maritime trade carried resin from the Styrax forests of Laos and Sumatra through Indian Ocean and Silk Road ports into the Islamic world, and from the late medieval period into Mediterranean and then northern European markets, where it became a fixture of church incense and, much later, of Grasse perfumery. Arabian bakhoor, which soaks oud wood in a mixture of resins and oils, is one product of this long exchange, still burned across the Gulf states and in homes throughout the region.

From liturgy to laboratory: the modern moment

Two threads run into the present. The first is unbroken liturgical use: Catholic and Orthodox churches still burn frankincense-based blends at the thurible in forms a Byzantine deacon would recognize, and household resin incense across India, the Gulf and East Asia continues much as it has for centuries. The second is a twentieth-century shift toward synthesis. As natural ambergris grew scarce and regulated, perfumers turned to ambroxide, a laboratory molecule derived from sclareol that reproduces ambergris’s dry, woody-amber facet without the animal source, and it now appears in incense sticks and cones as often as in fine fragrance.

The twelve moments are not twelve separate inventions of incense. They describe one habit, discovered independently on at least two continents, carried by trade wherever the raw resin itself could not grow, and still practiced today in forms that overlap more than they differ.

• incense
• history
• frankincense
• kyphi
• kodo