Myrrh: History and Traditional Use

Few substances have travelled so far through human history as myrrh. The reddish, bitter resin that weeps from small thorny trees of the genus Commiphora in the deserts of the Horn of Africa and southern Arabia was once worth more than its weight in many goods, carried thousands of miles by caravan, burned in temples, packed into the bodies of pharaohs, and pressed into the hands of the dying. This article traces what the historical record actually supports: where myrrh comes from and what its name means, its documented place in ancient Egypt, the great incense trade that carried it across the world, its role in the Bible and in burial, its long use in the medicine of Greece, Rome, China, and India, and its move into the modern pharmacy and laboratory. Where the record is firm we say so; where a claim is tradition, folklore, or still being argued over by researchers, we name it as such.

Table of Contents

  1. The Plant and the Meaning of Its Name
  2. Ancient Egypt: Embalming, Incense, and the Ebers Papyrus
  3. The Incense Route and "Arabia Felix"
  4. Myrrh in the Bible and in Burial
  5. Greek and Roman Medicine
  6. Traditional Chinese and Ayurvedic Medicine
  7. Medieval and Early-Modern Europe
  8. Into the Modern Pharmacy and Laboratory
  9. From Tradition to Modern Research
  10. References
  11. Connections
  12. Featured Videos

The Plant and the Meaning of Its Name

Myrrh is an aromatic oleo-gum-resin produced by several small, thorny trees and shrubs of the genus Commiphora (family Burseraceae), which grow in the dry, rocky country of northeastern Africa — especially Somalia, Ethiopia, and Eritrea — and across the southern Arabian Peninsula. The species most often named as the source of true myrrh are Commiphora myrrha and the closely related Commiphora molmol (the two names are used somewhat interchangeably in the older literature). When the bark is cut, or splits on its own, the tree exudes a pale, sticky sap that hardens in the air into irregular reddish-brown “tears.” These hardened tears are myrrh as it has been traded and used for thousands of years.

The plant has no single human “inventor” or founder; like nearly all ancient medicinal plants, its uses were discovered and refined independently by many peoples living near where it grows, and then carried outward along trade routes. What we can document with confidence is its name. The English word myrrh descends, through Greek and Latin, from a Semitic root meaning “bitter.” The Arabic murr and the Hebrew mor both carry that sense, and anyone who has tasted the resin understands why: it is genuinely, lastingly bitter, with a warm, balsamic edge. That bitterness is not incidental to its history — it is built into the very word, and it follows the resin into other languages. The Chinese name mo yao, for example, has been explained as “the medicine (yao) of mo,” with mo standing in for the foreign word murr.

It is worth keeping one distinction clear from the outset, because the names overlap in popular writing. The fragrant resin myrrh (from Commiphora myrrha / molmol) is not the same thing as guggul, the resin of the Indian species Commiphora mukul (also called Commiphora wightii), even though both come from the same genus and both have long traditional histories. This page is about myrrh proper; where Ayurvedic guggul enters the story it is noted as a related but distinct material.

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Ancient Egypt: Embalming, Incense, and the Ebers Papyrus

Some of the oldest and best-documented uses of myrrh come from ancient Egypt, where the resin was prized for ritual, perfume, and medicine alike. Egyptian embalmers used aromatic resins, myrrh among them, in preparing bodies for the afterlife: cavities were packed and bodies anointed with mixtures of resins and natron (a natural drying salt) to slow decay. The practical effect — that resin-treated tissue resisted putrefaction — was observed empirically long before anyone could speak of bacteria, and myrrh's genuine antimicrobial chemistry, discussed in the companion Benefits articles, offers a modern explanation for what the embalmers saw.

Myrrh also appears in the great Egyptian medical record. The Ebers Papyrus — one of the oldest and most complete medical texts to survive, generally dated to around 1550 BCE — records hundreds of remedies, and myrrh is named among the ingredients, including in preparations connected with wounds and bleeding. As a historical document of this age, it is best cited as a primary source rather than as a modern clinical reference, but it firmly places myrrh inside formal Egyptian medicine more than three thousand years ago.

One particularly vivid piece of evidence is carved in stone. The mortuary temple of Queen Hatshepsut at Deir el-Bahari (built in the fifteenth century BCE) shows reliefs of a famous trading expedition she sent to the land of Punt, on the Red Sea coast of the Horn of Africa. The reliefs and their inscriptions depict ships being loaded with treasures, and — remarkably — show porters carrying living myrrh trees, their root-balls bound up, to be replanted in Egypt. Whatever the full economics of that voyage, the carvings are a documented, dateable record of how seriously the Egyptian state valued a reliable supply of myrrh: it was worth mounting a major maritime expedition to obtain the trees themselves.

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The Incense Route and "Arabia Felix"

Because myrrh and its companion resin frankincense grew only in a few regions of southern Arabia and the Horn of Africa, but were wanted everywhere, they gave rise to one of the oldest long-distance trade networks in the world. Historians call it the Incense Route: a web of caravan tracks and sea lanes that carried resin north and west from the production areas of what is now southern Arabia and the Somali coast to the markets of Egypt, the Levant, Mesopotamia, and ultimately Greece and Rome. The trade is generally reckoned to have flourished for many centuries before and into the classical era, predating the better-known Silk Road.

The wealth this commerce brought to southern Arabia was proverbial in antiquity. Classical writers including Theophrastus, Strabo, and Pliny referred to the region as Arabia Felix — “Fortunate” or “Happy Arabia” — precisely because its incense exports made it rich. The Roman naturalist Pliny the Elder, writing his Natural History in the first century CE, devoted attention to both resins, describing the trees and complaining about the high prices that taxes, tolls, and the many middlemen along the route had piled onto frankincense and myrrh by the time they reached Roman buyers. Pliny's account is named here as a historical primary source; what it documents beyond dispute is that, in the Roman world, these resins were luxury goods of very high value.

That value is the backdrop to everything else in myrrh's story. A medicine, perfume, and ritual material that had to be carried thousands of miles across desert was, by definition, precious — which is exactly why it turns up as a royal gift, a temple offering, and a treasure fit to honor a birth or a burial.

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Myrrh in the Bible and in Burial

Myrrh is woven through the Hebrew and Christian scriptures, and these references are among the best-known parts of its history. In the Book of Exodus, myrrh is named as the first ingredient of the sacred anointing oil, blended with cinnamon, fragrant cane, cassia, and olive oil (Exodus 30:23–25). The Song of Songs returns to myrrh again and again as an image of perfume, love, and luxury. These passages show that, to the writers of the Hebrew Bible, myrrh was a substance of the highest worth and a natural symbol of something costly and set apart.

In the Christian New Testament, myrrh frames the life of Jesus at both ends. The Gospel of Matthew records that the visitors from the East (the Magi) brought the infant Jesus three gifts: gold, frankincense, and myrrh (Matthew 2:11) — the famous trio whose very listing tells us myrrh stood alongside gold as a treasure. At the other end of the story, the Gospel of John records that Nicodemus brought a large quantity of myrrh and aloes to prepare the body of Jesus for burial (John 19:39). That detail reflects a real cultural practice: aromatic resins, myrrh among them, were used in the ancient Near East to anoint and perfume the dead. The recurring association of myrrh with death and mourning — from Egyptian embalming to Jewish burial custom — is one of the most consistent threads in its history, and it is why the gift of myrrh to a newborn has so often been read as foreshadowing.

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Greek and Roman Medicine

The physicians of the classical Mediterranean inherited myrrh from this older Near Eastern and Egyptian world and gave it a firm place in their written medicine. The first-century Greek physician and pharmacologist Dioscorides, whose De Materia Medica became the foundational drug reference of the Western world for more than a millennium, described myrrh in detail and recommended it for a range of complaints — among them coughs and ailments of the chest, problems of the mouth, and the dressing of wounds and sores, drawing on its drying and astringent character. His older contemporary Pliny the Elder, in the Natural History, likewise catalogued medicinal uses of myrrh alongside its trade and its price.

Myrrh's reputation as a wound medicine is one of its most enduring. Tradition holds that it was carried as part of the practical medicine of the ancient world, applied to wounds for its astringent, drying, and preservative qualities, and this picture is consistent with what the classical texts describe. The great second-century physician Galen, whose system dominated European and Islamic medicine for centuries afterward, incorporated myrrh into compound preparations. From these classical authorities the resin passed, by way of the Arabic medical tradition, into the medicine of medieval Europe with its core indications — mouth and throat, chest, and wounds — largely intact.

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Traditional Chinese and Ayurvedic Medicine

Myrrh is not native to China, and its place in Chinese medicine is itself a record of the incense trade carrying the resin eastward. Imported myrrh entered the formal Chinese herbal literature comparatively late: it is documented in the Kaibao Bencao (the materia medica compiled in the Kaibao era, around 973 CE), and its Chinese name mo yao preserves, as noted above, the foreign word for the bitter resin. In Traditional Chinese Medicine, mo yao is classified among the herbs that “invigorate the blood”: it is used, traditionally, to move blood that is felt to be stagnant, to reduce swelling, and to relieve pain from injuries and certain internal complaints. It is very commonly paired with frankincense (ru xiang), the two resins being given together as a classic combination for pain and trauma — a pairing that echoes their joint history all the way back to Egypt and the Bible.

In the Ayurvedic tradition of the Indian subcontinent, the closely related genus Commiphora supplies the prized resin guggul (from Commiphora mukul/wightii), used for a range of purposes including conditions framed in Ayurvedic terms around inflammation and the joints. Myrrh proper and guggul are distinct resins from different species, and it is most accurate to say that the genus as a whole has a deep traditional presence in South Asian medicine, with guggul as its best-known Indian representative. Across these Eastern systems, as in the West, the consistent themes attached to myrrh and its relatives are the relief of pain, the reduction of swelling, and the treatment of wounds and sores.

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Medieval and Early-Modern Europe

Through the medieval and early-modern centuries, myrrh remained a standard item of the European apothecary, valued at once as a medicine, a perfume ingredient, and an incense. Its place in church ritual kept it familiar even to those who never used it as a drug, while physicians and apothecaries, working from the inherited authority of Dioscorides and Galen as transmitted through Arabic and Latin texts, continued to reach for myrrh for the mouth and gums, the throat and chest, and the cleaning and dressing of wounds. Tinctures of myrrh in spirits of wine became a familiar preparation, convenient to keep and to apply.

The wound-medicine reputation in particular persisted: a myrrh tincture or wash was a recognizable remedy for sore gums, mouth ulcers, sore throats, and minor wounds well into the modern era. Because the resin had to be imported from far away, it kept an air of the exotic and the valuable that more local herbs lacked, and it appears in pharmacopoeias and herbals as a respectable, if costly, ingredient rather than a humble roadside cure. That long continuity — the same handful of uses, recorded across the classical, Islamic, and European traditions — set the stage for myrrh's formal recognition in the modern pharmacy.

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Into the Modern Pharmacy and Laboratory

Myrrh made the transition from ancient remedy to officially recognized medicine in the twentieth century, chiefly for the very uses the old texts had named. In Germany, the expert Commission E — the official body that reviewed herbal medicines — issued a monograph (dated 1987) approving myrrh tincture for the local treatment of mild inflammations of the lining of the mouth and throat, with directions to dab the undiluted tincture onto the affected area or to gargle with a few drops in water. More recently, the European Medicines Agency's committee on herbal medicinal products has published an assessment of Commiphora molmol gum-resin, again centered on the traditional oral and pharyngeal use. In other words, the modern regulatory record has formalized exactly the indication that runs from Dioscorides through the medieval apothecary: myrrh as a remedy for the sore, inflamed mouth and throat.

The modern laboratory has also begun to explain why myrrh does what tradition claimed. A landmark example is a 1996 report in the journal Nature, in which Piero Dolara and colleagues isolated sesquiterpene compounds from myrrh — notably furanoeudesma-1,3-diene — and showed in animal experiments that they produced pain relief that could be blocked by the opioid-antagonist drug naloxone, pointing to an interaction with the body's opioid receptors. This is a genuinely documented scientific milestone with named researchers and a verifiable publication, and it gives a chemical basis to myrrh's ancient reputation as a pain-easing resin. Later work has continued to map myrrh's chemistry and its anti-inflammatory, antibacterial, and analgesic activities, as the references below record.

Not every modern claim for myrrh has held up, and honesty requires saying so. In Egypt around 2001–2002, a purified myrrh product called Mirazid (made from Commiphora molmol) was registered and promoted as a treatment for schistosomiasis (bilharzia), a serious parasitic disease, with early trials reporting very high cure rates. Subsequent independent studies, however, found Mirazid to be largely ineffective against schistosomiasis at the recommended doses, and public-health researchers warned against relying on it in place of the standard drug praziquantel. The episode is a useful caution: a long and genuine traditional pedigree does not guarantee that a remedy will work for a specific modern disease, and rigorous testing is what settles the question. Myrrh's well-supported modern role remains the local, supportive one — a soothing, antiseptic resin for the mouth, gums, and throat and for minor wounds — not a cure for serious systemic infection.

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From Tradition to Modern Research

What stands out across myrrh's long history is how steady its core uses have been. Egyptian embalmers and physicians, Greek and Roman doctors, Chinese and Ayurvedic practitioners, and medieval European apothecaries — working separately, in different languages and medical systems — converged on a small, recognizable set of applications: caring for the mouth, gums, and throat; easing pain; reducing swelling; and cleaning and dressing wounds. That convergence is itself a kind of evidence. When cultures with no contact reach for the same bitter resin to do the same jobs, it suggests the plant really does something, even if no one could yet say what.

Modern phytochemistry has begun to supply the missing “why.” Researchers have catalogued the resin's many constituents — the soothing gum, the resinous commiphoric acids, and above all the volatile sesquiterpenes such as furanoeudesma-1,3-diene and curzerene — and have linked them in laboratory studies to anti-inflammatory, antibacterial, and pain-relieving effects that plausibly underlie the traditional indications. The detailed chemistry and the clinical evidence are taken up in the companion Myrrh Benefits articles, including Oral Health, Wound Healing, Anti-Inflammatory action, and Antimicrobial and Parasitic activity.

The thread that runs from a relief on Hatshepsut's temple wall, through a gift laid before a manger and a tincture in a medieval apothecary's shop, to a 1996 paper in Nature, is unbroken. Tradition raised the questions; research is now testing the answers. That continuity — a bitter desert resin used the same handful of ways across continents and millennia, and only now being explained — is what makes the history of myrrh worth knowing.

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References

The list below combines peer-reviewed reviews and studies of Commiphora myrrha / Commiphora molmol with curated PubMed topic-search links into the historical and ethnobotanical literature. Historical primary texts — the Ebers Papyrus, Dioscorides' De Materia Medica, Pliny's Natural History, the Hatshepsut reliefs at Deir el-Bahari, the Bible, and the Kaibao Bencao — are named in the article as historical sources rather than as modern citations. Links open in a new tab.

  1. Shen T, Li GH, Wang XN, Lou HX. The genus Commiphora: a review of its traditional uses, phytochemistry and pharmacology. Journal of Ethnopharmacology. 2012;142(2):319-330. — doi:10.1016/j.jep.2012.05.025 (PMID: 22626923)
  2. Hanus LO, Rezanka T, Dembitsky VM, Moussaieff A. Myrrh — Commiphora chemistry. Biomedical Papers of the Medical Faculty of the University Palacky, Olomouc. 2005;149(1):3-27. — doi:10.5507/bp.2005.001 (PMID: 16170385)
  3. Nomicos EY. Myrrh: medical marvel or myth of the Magi? Holistic Nursing Practice. 2007;21(6):308-323. — doi:10.1097/01.HNP.0000298616.32846.34 (PMID: 17978635)
  4. Dolara P, Luceri C, Ghelardini C, et al. Analgesic effects of myrrh. Nature. 1996;379(6560):29. — doi:10.1038/379029a0 (PMID: 8538737)
  5. Su S, Wang T, Duan JA, et al. Anti-inflammatory and analgesic activity of different extracts of Commiphora myrrha. Journal of Ethnopharmacology. 2011;134(2):251-258. — doi:10.1016/j.jep.2010.12.003 (PMID: 21167270)
  6. Tipton DA, Lyle B, Babich H, Dabbous MK. In vitro cytotoxic and anti-inflammatory effects of myrrh oil on human gingival fibroblasts and epithelial cells. Toxicology in Vitro. 2003;17(3):301-310. — doi:10.1016/S0887-2333(03)00018-3 (PMID: 12781209)
  7. Sheir Z, Nasr AA, Massoud A, et al. A safe, effective, herbal antischistosomal therapy derived from myrrh. American Journal of Tropical Medicine and Hygiene. 2001;65(6):700-704. — doi:10.4269/ajtmh.2001.65.700 (PMID: 11791960)
  8. Osman MM, El-Taweel HA, Shehab AY, Farag HF. Ineffectiveness of myrrh-derivative Mirazid against schistosomiasis and fascioliasis in humans. Eastern Mediterranean Health Journal. 2010;16(9):932-936. — PMID: 21218718
  9. Commiphora myrrha / myrrh — traditional use, history, and ethnobotany — PubMed: myrrh traditional use and history
  10. Frankincense and myrrh — phytochemistry and pharmacology of the two resins — PubMed: frankincense and myrrh pharmacology

External Authoritative Resources

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Connections

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