Mummia

Based on Wikipedia: Mummia

For roughly seven hundred years, Europeans consumed human corpses as medicine. Not metaphorically. Not symbolically. They ground up mummies into powder, mixed the remains into tinctures, and swallowed the dead to cure everything from headaches to broken bones. King Francis I of France carried a personal supply with him at all times, just in case he got hurt.

This wasn't some fringe practice relegated to back-alley quacks. The finest physicians prescribed it. The most reputable apothecaries sold it. And the demand was so insatiable that when Egypt couldn't supply enough ancient corpses, European merchants began manufacturing their own from freshly executed criminals.

How did this happen?

The answer involves a mistranslation, a shortage of exotic imports, and the remarkable human capacity for self-deception when money is involved.

The Original Medicine: Black Gold from Persia

The story begins not with corpses but with tar.

In ancient Persia, physicians prized a particular substance that oozed from the mountains near Darabgerd. It was a type of pissasphalt—a semi-liquid form of bitumen, which is the thick, sticky, petroleum-based material we now use to pave roads. The Arabic word for this substance was mūmiyā, derived from mūm, meaning wax.

Persian doctors applied this black, waxy material as a salve for cuts, bruises, and broken bones. They also prescribed it internally for stomach ulcers and tuberculosis. The results, according to their records, were impressive. The substance became famous throughout the Islamic world and eventually caught the attention of European traders.

There was just one problem: the authentic Persian pissasphalt was extremely rare and therefore extremely expensive.

Greek physicians had already noted alternatives. Pedanius Dioscorides, writing around 50 to 70 CE in his influential work De Materia Medica, ranked bitumen from the Dead Sea as medicinally superior to the pissasphalt from Apollonia in Illyria (modern-day Albania). Both were considered acceptable substitutes for the scarce Persian original. The ancient world understood that these were all variations of the same basic mineral substance.

Where Things Went Wrong

When the Crusaders marched into the Middle East in the eleventh and twelfth centuries, they encountered the famous drug mummia firsthand. They saw its remarkable effects on wounds and fractures. They wanted to bring it back to Europe.

But they also noticed something else. The ancient Egyptians had used bitumen—that same black, tarry substance—to preserve their dead. Egyptian mummies were often coated or stuffed with the stuff. The Arabic word for this embalming material was the same: mūmiyā.

Here's where the translation error occurred.

Medieval Latin scholars transliterated the Arabic mūmiyā into Latin as mumia. This single word now carried two meanings: "a bituminous medicine from Persia" and "the preserved corpses of ancient Egypt." The slippage from one meaning to the other was almost inevitable.

The Arab physician Serapion the Younger, writing in the twelfth century, clearly described bituminous mumia and its many uses. But when Simon Geneunsis translated this text into Latin around 1300, he rendered it as "the mumia of the sepulchers with aloes and myrrh mixed with the liquid of the human body." Gerard of Cremona made a similar mistake, describing mumiya as "the substance found in the land where bodies are buried with aloes."

The physician Matthaeus Platearius went further, writing that "Mumia is a spice found in the sepulchers of the dead.... That is best which is black, ill-smelling, shiny, and massive."

Notice what happened. The original substance—mountain tar from Persia—had become something scraped out of Egyptian tombs.

Three Steps to Cannibalism

The transition from mineral medicine to medical cannibalism happened in three distinct stages.

First, European suppliers began substituting the black exudation from Egyptian mummies for the natural Persian product. After all, it looked similar. It was dark and resinous. And Egypt had an endless supply of ancient tombs.

The Baghdad physician Abd al-Latif al-Baghdadi, writing around 1200, described ancient Egyptian mummies and noted that although the word mummy properly denoted bitumen or asphalt, "the mummy found in the hollows of the corpses in Egypt differs but immaterially from the nature of mineral mummy; and where any difficulty arises in procuring the latter, may be substituted in its stead."

Second, the rare black exudation from the interior cavities of corpses got confused with the black bitumen Egyptians had used as an embalming preservative. Instead of carefully scraping out just the resinous material, suppliers began processing the entire bitumen-coated wrappings and preserved flesh.

Third—and this is where things get truly gruesome—suppliers began substituting the blackened flesh of entire mummies for any bituminous material whatsoever. The tombs of Egypt couldn't keep up with European demand, so a commerce developed in fraudulent mummies, sometimes called mumia falsa.

The Italian surgeon Giovanni da Vigo, writing around 1500, defined mumia straightforwardly as "the flesh of a dead body that is embalmed," and listed it among essential drugs. He believed it had "virtue to heal over wounds and to staunch blood."

The Recipe for Fake Mummy

The Swiss-German physician Paracelsus took the concept in an even stranger direction. He argued that true pharmaceutical mummia must come from "the body of a man who did not die a natural death but rather died an unnatural death with a healthy body and without sickness." The violent end, he believed, concentrated the victim's vital essence.

The German physician Oswald Croll provided a detailed recipe. First, obtain the corpse of a young red-haired man who had been hanged or broken on the wheel. Let the body hang exposed to the air for several days. Cut it into small pieces. Sprinkle with powdered myrrh and aloes. Soak in wine. Dry thoroughly. Grind into tincture.

This was medical advice from a respected physician in the early 1600s.

The French barber surgeon Ambroise Paré revealed how the trade worked in practice. In France, apothecaries stole the bodies of executed criminals, dried them in ovens, and sold the flesh as mummia. In Egypt, merchants collected dead bodies and prepared them specifically for export to Europe.

Paré recounted a conversation with one such Egyptian merchant who admitted to the practice. The merchant expressed surprise that Christians, "so dainty-mouthed, could eat the bodies of the dead."

It was a reasonable question.

The Beginning of Doubt

Not everyone was fooled.

The French naturalist Pierre Belon, writing in the mid-1500s, went back to the original sources and concluded that the Arab physicians had actually referred to the pissasphalt of Dioscorides—plain old mineral pitch. The translators had made a terrible mistake. Europeans were now importing both "falsely called" mumia scraped from cadavers and "artificial mumia" made by exposing recently buried bodies to the sun before grinding them up.

Belon considered the available mummia valueless and potentially dangerous. Yet he noted that King Francis I always carried a mixture of mummia and rhubarb as an emergency remedy for any injury. Even skepticism couldn't override royal habit.

Ambroise Paré admitted to personally administering mumia "a hundred times" before condemning it as a "wicked kind of drug" that "doth nothing help the diseased." He stopped prescribing it and encouraged others to do the same.

The English herbalist John Gerard, in his 1597 Herball, traced the error back to its source. Ancient Egyptians had used cedar pitch for embalming. The preserved bodies that shopkeepers falsely called "mumia" should properly be called pissasphalton—pitch-asphalt. He blamed the translator of Serapion, who had interpreted the Arabic "according to his own fancy."

Persistence of Belief

Despite mounting evidence that mummia was a translation error with no therapeutic value, the practice continued for centuries.

The physicist Robert Boyle, one of the founders of modern chemistry, praised mummia in the seventeenth century as "one of the useful medicines commended and given by our physicians for falls and bruises." The Dutch physician Steven Blankaart's 1754 medical dictionary still listed four types of mumia: Arabian exudate from spice-embalmed bodies, Egyptian bodies embalmed with pissasphalt, sun-dried bodies from the desert, and natural pissasphalt.

Shakespeare mentioned mummia. So did Francis Bacon and John Donne. The substance was familiar enough in Britain that writers could reference it casually, confident their audiences would understand.

The English medical writer John Quincy noted in 1718 that mummia was "quite out of use in Prescription," but it remained in medicinal catalogues. Remarkably, the German chemical-pharmaceutical company Merck offered mummia for sale as late as 1924.

Seven hundred years, from the twelfth century to the twentieth.

The Art Connection

Even as physicians abandoned mummia, artists discovered a new use for it.

Ground-up mummies made excellent pigment. The British chemist Arthur Herbert Church explained that "mummy" as a pigment worked better than raw asphalt because the embalming process had subjected it to considerable heat, driving off volatile hydrocarbons. The bones and other body parts added solidity to the mixture, making it less likely to melt or run.

Church noted that "a London colourman informs me that one Egyptian mummy furnishes sufficient material to satisfy the demands of his customers for twenty years." He added, with characteristic British understatement, that "some samples of the pigment sold as 'mummy' are spurious."

Mummy brown became a popular oil paint color throughout the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries. Artists prized its warm, rich tone for shadows and glazes. Whether they fully understood what they were painting with is another question.

The modern pigment sold as "mummy brown" contains no human remains. It's a mixture of kaolin, quartz, goethite, and hematite—minerals that approximate the color without the cannibalism.

What It All Means

The mummia story reveals several uncomfortable truths about how medicine works—or fails to work.

First, the power of authority. For centuries, physicians prescribed mummia because other physicians had prescribed it before them. The original Arab sources described a mineral substance. The translators got it wrong. But once the error entered the medical tradition, it took on a life of its own. Kings carried it. Surgeons administered it. Apothecaries sold it. Who was going to argue with centuries of accumulated wisdom?

Second, the economics of belief. Mummia was expensive, and expensive things are assumed to work. The rarity of genuine Persian pissasphalt created a market for substitutes. Each substitute was slightly different from the original—first Egyptian tomb exudate, then Egyptian mummy innards, then whole mummies, then fresh corpses. At each step, the product drifted further from the original substance, but the prices stayed high and the demand continued.

Third, the human capacity for motivated reasoning. When Ambroise Paré's Egyptian merchant expressed surprise that Christians would eat the dead, he identified something Europeans preferred not to examine too closely. They called it medicine. They called it mumia. They did not call it what it was: cannibalism dressed up in Latin terminology and sold by apothecaries.

Fourth, the gap between scientific knowledge and actual practice. By the mid-1500s, scholars like Pierre Belon had traced the error to its source. They knew mummia was a mistranslation. They knew the substance had no therapeutic value. And yet the practice continued for another four hundred years. Knowledge alone doesn't change behavior.

Parallel Traditions

The West wasn't alone in valuing mysterious dark substances scraped from mountains.

In Ayurvedic medicine, the traditional healing system of India, practitioners use a substance called shilajit or mumijo. The name comes from Sanskrit shilajatu, meaning "rock-conqueror," or from the Persian mūmiyā—the same root as European mummia.

Shilajit is described as a dark-brown, strong-smelling substance found on rocks in India and Nepal. Modern analysis suggests it probably consists principally of dried animal urine. Like European mummia, it was considered a powerful remedy. Unlike European mummia, its preparation never involved grinding up human corpses.

The parallel illustrates how similar-looking substances in different cultures can develop completely different meanings and uses. Persian mountain tar and Indian rock deposits share a linguistic heritage but diverged dramatically in their medical applications.

The Words Themselves

Language preserves history in unexpected ways.

The Oxford English Dictionary traces the semantic journey of "mummy" from its first recorded use around 1400—meaning a medicinal preparation—through Shakespeare's jocular use for dead flesh in 1598, to its modern meaning of an embalmed body by 1615.

Along the way, the word picked up secondary meanings: a sovereign remedy, a bituminous drug from Arabia, a kind of grafting wax, a rich brown pigment. Each meaning reflects a different stage in the substance's cultural history.

The distinction between "mummy" (embalmed body) and "mummia" (medicine) solidified only gradually. For centuries, the words were interchangeable because the concepts were intertwined. You couldn't have the medicine without the body. The separation of meanings happened as the medical use declined and the archaeological meaning took over.

The Trade That Wasn't

Egypt eventually banned the export of mummies in the sixteenth century. This should have ended the trade.

Instead, it moved underground and got worse. European apothecaries, cut off from their Egyptian supply, began manufacturing their own mummies from local corpses. The practice Oswald Croll described—harvesting executed criminals, drying them, grinding them up—became standard procedure for meeting the continued demand.

The ban on Egyptian exports didn't reduce the consumption of human remains. It merely changed the source of supply from ancient corpses to fresh ones.

Why This Matters Now

We like to imagine that modern medicine is different. That we've moved past the superstitions and errors of the past. That our treatments are based on evidence, tested in clinical trials, approved by regulatory agencies.

And largely, this is true. We don't eat mummies anymore.

But the mummia story should give us pause. For seven centuries, the best-educated physicians in Europe prescribed a treatment based on a translation error. They had access to the original sources. Scholars repeatedly pointed out the mistake. And yet the practice continued, sustained by tradition, economics, and the human tendency to believe that expensive, exotic things must work.

The physicians of 1500 were not stupid. They were operating within a system that made certain kinds of knowledge hard to apply and certain kinds of errors hard to correct. They trusted authority. They followed precedent. They sold what customers demanded.

These forces haven't disappeared. They've just changed form.

The next time you're told that some expensive, exotic treatment has been used for centuries in traditional medicine, it might be worth asking: used to do what, exactly? By whom? Based on what evidence? And whether somewhere along the line, someone might have made a translation error that nobody ever bothered to correct.