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From Miracle Cure to Macabre Meal: The Strange History of Why Europeans Ate Mummies
For centuries, Europeans consumed ground-up Egyptian mummies as medicine. This bizarre practice wasn't ancient magic but a colossal misunderstanding. It all began when the word for a medicinal tar, 'mummia,' was confused with the embalmed bodies themselves, leading to a grim trade.
Imagine walking into a 17th-century apothecary. You complain of a headache, a bruise, or perhaps something more serious. Instead of a pill or a liquid tincture, the apothecary reaches for a jar filled with a dark, pungent powder and tells you it's the finest medicine from Egypt. The medicine's name is Mummia, and it is made from the ground-up remains of an ancient Egyptian mummy. For hundreds of years, this was not a scene from a horror story but a legitimate, if gruesome, medical reality across Europe. But why? The answer lies not in ancient superstition, but in a simple, centuries-long mistranslation.
The Original Medicine: A Sticky Black Goo
The story begins not in an Egyptian tomb, but on a Persian mountain. The original substance known as mūmiyāʾ was a type of bitumen, or asphalt, that naturally seeped from the earth. This black, tar-like substance was highly valued in ancient and medieval medicine. Physicians from ancient Greece to the Islamic Golden Age, including the famed Avicenna, prescribed it for a wide range of ailments, from setting broken bones and healing wounds to treating stomach ulcers and concussions. It was considered a powerful, natural panacea.
A Fatal Translation
The critical confusion began when Europeans started translating Arabic medical texts into Latin during the 12th century. They came across the word mūmiyāʾ, which they Latinized as mummia. At the same time, they knew that ancient Egyptians used a dark, resinous substance in their embalming process to preserve the dead. To the European eye, the blackened, hard-coated bodies from Egyptian tombs looked as if they were covered in, or perhaps even made of, the very same medicinal bitumen from Persia.
A disastrous leap of logic followed: if bitumen (mummia) is a powerful medicine, and Egyptian mummies are preserved with it, then the mummies themselves must contain its healing properties. The term mummia gradually shifted its meaning. It no longer referred to a mineral but to the embalmed human remains themselves. The cure was no longer the substance; it was the body.
From Medicine Cabinet to Macabre Marketplace
By the 16th century, demand for medicinal mummies was so high that a thriving, grisly trade emerged. Tombs in Egypt were plundered, and mummified remains—men, women, and children—were shipped to Europe to be ground into powder. This 'mummy medicine' was prescribed by doctors and sold in apothecaries as a high-end cure-all, believed to cure everything from epilepsy to the plague. The philosopher Francis Bacon and even the king of England, Charles II, were known to have taken it.
As genuine ancient mummies became scarce, a fraudulent market arose. Unscrupulous merchants would create counterfeit mummies using the corpses of executed criminals, beggars, or plague victims. They would 'prepare' the bodies by drying them in the sun, stuffing them with bitumen, and passing them off as ancient Egyptian artifacts to unsuspecting European buyers.
Not Just for Eating: Parties and Paint
The European fascination with mummies didn't stop at medicine. By the Victorian era, Egyptomania was in full swing. Wealthy socialites would purchase mummies not for consumption, but for entertainment. They hosted 'mummy unwrapping parties,' where guests would gather to watch the centuries-old bandages be cut away from a corpse, a macabre centerpiece for an evening's amusement.
The use of mummies also seeped into the art world. A pigment known as 'Mummy Brown' was created by grinding up Egyptian mummies and mixing the dust with oil. It produced a rich, transparent brown hue favored by many artists of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. Many painters used it without knowing its true origin, and the story goes that artist Edward Burne-Jones was so horrified upon learning the truth that he famously gave his tube of Mummy Brown a proper burial in his garden.
The End of an Era
By the 19th and early 20th centuries, the practice began to die out. The rise of scientific medicine revealed the complete lack of therapeutic benefit in consuming human remains. Furthermore, the ethical revulsion, combined with the widespread knowledge of industry fraud, made the practice untenable. What began as a linguistic error ended as a bizarre and ghoulish chapter in medical history, a powerful reminder of how a simple misunderstanding can lead to centuries of unintended consequences.