As humanity, we’ve proven to be quite naive when it comes to miraculous products. Even nowadays, how many ran to find some chlorine dioxide when random sources claimed it helped cure Covid? Well, just as many took unproven sources as truthful, centuries ago, a mistranslation prompted doctors and people to literally use mummies to heal certain ailments. What’s interesting is that as far as the first decades of the 20th century, mummia, or mummy powder, as it came to be known, was still sold at apothecaries and stores in many countries of the world.
What is mummia?
Mummia or mumia was a type of bitumen with a resin texture that was found and commonly used in Western Asia. It comes from the Arabic word mūmiyā, and since ancient times, it had several usages like glue, mortar, waterproofing, aphrodisiac, and medicinal. One of its main healing purposes was to treat wounds, fractures, and even internal bleeding. The disinfectant properties of this type of resin and asphalt proved to be effective when treating severe wounds.
The word mum, of Persian origins, meant wax. Eventually, it migrated to the Arab world and was used to refer to asphalt. After its common use in Arabic realms, it was imported to Ancient Greece where it was known as pissasphaltus, and soon also became a popular medicinal ingredient. Now, in Egypt, this bitumen started to be used for embalming bodies around the time of the Twelfth Dynasty, which happened between 1991-1802 BCE.
The popularization of mummia
Human beings have always resorted to, well, human beings for medicinal purposes, especially during the Middle Ages. There are records of human intake as far as the Ancient Greeks, as well as records of bitumen having healing properties. Later on, Pliny the Elder wrote thorough research on bitumen or mummia that became quite popular in the medical literature.
The popularity of mummia in the Arab world was so strong that physicians even debated on where it was best to gather the bitumen or what substitutes could be equally as effective but less expensive than the scarce Persian mummia, often extracted from the mountain of Darabgerd in Persia. The Greek physician Pedanius assured that the bitumen from the Dead Sea was superior even to the recently discovered asphalt from Apollonia, and that was as effective as mummia.
We’ll go in-depth on how the mistranslation happened, but it’s believed that even around the fifteenth century, Paracelsus was already thinking about real mummies when he wrote about mummia having a unique ‘vital force’ with medicinal properties. By the next century, mummy powder was already a thing, and thanks to the commercial routes from the East, access to real mummies became a reality in Europe.
Transliteration
Let’s get into the confusion that led to a very unhealthy and bizarre practice. Around the 12th century, when both goods and knowledge started to get imported from the East into Europe (as well as crusaders learning first hand about the healing properties of mummia), translators came across the usage of mummia in medical practice. Since mummia was used in Egypt in the embalming process, they understood that mummia was actually the bodies embalmed.
A physician from Arab, known as Serapion the Younger, wrote in the 12th century about the miraculous mummia bitumen and the uses they gave to this element, including embalming in ancient Egypt. Around that time, Gerard of Cremona in Italy, mistranslated the word mumiya as “the substance found in the land where bodies are buried with aloes by which the liquid of the dead, mixed with the aloes, is transformed and it is similar to marine pitch.” Also, in the 12th century, Matthaeus Platearious wrote that “Mumia is a spice found in the sepulchers of the dead […] which is black, ill-smelling, shiny, and massive.”
Two centuries later, in the 14th century, Simon Geneunsis took these translations and expanded the information claiming that “this is the mummia of the sepulchers with aloes and myrrh mixed with the liquid of the human body.” Soon, the word mummia, or mummy, came to mean “a black resinous exudate scraped out of embalmed Egyptian mummies,” and thus a craze over Egyptian mummies, and a very profitable trade between Egypt and Europe began.
Miraculous medicine
In the 16th century, Egypt officially banned the commerce of mummia, but the craze over the miraculous product was still a thing. So, merchants who had made a living out of this product started to sell fake mummia, known as mummia falsa, made of basically whatever body they could find in Europe. Also, it was around this time when translators realized the transliteration mistake, and some physicians stopped prescribing mummia; however, it remained a quite popular drug even when it was mostly a fake.
Mummia came to be known as mummy powder or Mummia vera aegyptiaca, and it was either applied in powder form directly on the skin for bruises or open wounds or mixed with oils and other liquids as an oral treatment for other ailments.
Victorians and the Egyptomania
The craze around mummia would become a mania in the late 18th century and early 19th century after Napoleon invaded Egypt in 1798. The art, culture, and goods from Ancient Egypt started to reach Europe, and by the 1830s rich aristocrats sponsored archaeological enterprises to get their hands on these treasures. Of course, mummies became one of their main targets. They weren’t only ‘amazing’ decorative elements at aristocratic houses, but also, the main source of the miraculous mummia that had stopped being exported from Egypt.
Especially, in Victorian England, Egyptomania became the latest trend, and upper classes turned their minds and souls into anything that had to do with Ancient Egypt. This culture inspired food, fashion, literature, and naturally, art to the point that artists would use mummy powder mixed with oils to create a unique tint that came to be known as mummy brown. But as we’ve seen, that’s the least strange usage mummies had.
Perhaps, if Victorians and their European ancestors knew about that terrible translation mistake, they would be horrified about how they just jumped to consume mummies just because some texts claimed it was miraculous. More importantly, besides feeling a bit of disgust, I can’t help but think about how much more would we know about Ancient Egypt if Europeans hadn’t literally devoured all those mummy specimens.
Photos from Wikimedia Commons
