Why were nice smelling things so valuable? Why were they as valuable as the solar metal (gold)? Because everything smelled really bad in antiquity.
In fact, everything smelled really bad up until the widespread use of the automobile. Before the automobile the horse, as well as the ox and ass were the primary modes of transportation and labor. The automobile was a lifesaver in some really stinky times.
In most cities there were city lots, and sometimes whole city blocks that were dedicated solely to the storage of horse shit. In fact, in any city built before 1880 majority of the houses were raised anywhere from 2 - 4 feet off the ground, because that was how high the horse manure would get. And with so many horses, many literally worked to death, they wouldn't clean up a dead horse immediately. They would let it rot and soften for three or four days until it could more easily be chopped up and removed. Pleasant, huh? Ancient cities stunk. When I was in Florence I found a street that was named after how bad it stunk, the Via Delle Stinche, literally the Way of the Stench. In Pompeii most street crossings are elevated stepping stones, because the streets literally flowed with shit and piss. One is reminded of the bolgias in the sixth circle of Dante's Inferno when it rained. When it rained in the city, that sight must have been what nightmares are made of.
In addition, people really didn't bathe in antiquity. There was no deodorant. The earliest known deodorant was created by Ziryab in Baghdad in the 9th Century. But modern deodorant as we know it wasn't invented until 1888, and it wasn't in popular usage until about the 1930s. Most people just scented themselves in perfumes. Shaving the groin and arm pits were not common in antiquity, which happen to be the two sweatiest places on the human body, and pubic hair holds on to all that stench (biologically, that's why we have pubic hair, probably for holding pheromones, which literally means "to bear impetus"). People were stinky.
I remember visiting Mesa Verde to study the dwellings of the Ancestral Pueblo Native Americans, and when looking at how they collected water, which was very limited, a woman asked, "How did they bathe with so little water?" The guide simply replied, "They didn't." That woman was very disgusted. If the Ancestral Peublos bathed it was probably more for ceremonial purposes than hygiene, and that would probably have been about two or three baths for an individual's entire life.
Really, the only period in ancient history that was the cleanest and least stinky would have been Old Kingdom Egypt (around 3rd Century BCE). They habitually removed every hair on their bodies to prevent lice, and they regularly bathed (even slaves). Oxen and ass manure would still have been an issue, but that's why they had incense.
Given all of this, it is easy to see why incense was just as valuable as gold. Incense wasn't some luxury for the Pharaoh. It was a necessity of life. Anyone who has ever walked into a latrine or come across a corpse (i.e. roadkill or otherwise), or simply encountered someone who hasn't bathed in a month, then incense would simply become a necessity to live with that all day, everyday, for the rest of your life. (I think this is why hippies like incense).
I can only imagine how pleasant a person's cigarette or a stray fart would smell in our contemporary cities to someone from 2000 BCE.
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