MUMMIES AND THE USEFULNESS OF DEATH

By Mariel Carr 

What do ancient Egyptian mummies, early modern medicines, a 19th-century philosopher, and a 21st-century chemist have in common?

Since the 12th century, Europeans had been eating Egyptian mummies as medicine.

In later centuries unmummified corpses were passed off as mummy medicine, and eventually some Europeans no longer cared whether the bodies they were ingesting had been mummified or not. These practices, however strange, are just some of the many ways people have made something useful out of death.

 

A Gross Misunderstanding

The eating of Egyptian mummies reached its peak in Europe by the 16th century. Mummies could be found on apothecary shelves in the form of bodies broken into pieces or ground into powder. Why did Europeans believe in the medicinal value of the mummy? The answer probably comes down to a string of misunderstandings.

Today we think of bitumen as asphalt, the black, sticky substance that coats our roads. It’s a naturally occurring hydrocarbon that has been used in construction in the Middle East since ancient times. (The book of Genesis lists it as one of the materials used in the Tower of Babel.)

The ancients also used bitumen to protect tree trunks and roots from insects and to treat an array of human ailments. It is viscous when heated but hardens when dried, making it useful for stabilizing broken bones and creating poultices for rashes. In his 1st-century text Natural History, Roman naturalist Pliny the Elder recommends ingesting bitumen with wine to cure chronic coughs and dysentery or to combine it with vinegar to dissolve and remove clotted blood. Other uses included the treatment of cataracts, toothaches, and skin diseases.

Natural bitumen was abundant in the ancient Middle East, where it formed in geological basins from the remains of tiny plants and animals. It had a variety of consistencies, from semiliquid (known today as pissasphalt) to semisolid (bitumen). In his 1st-century pharmacopoeia, Materia Medica, the Greek physician Dioscorides wrote that bitumen from the Dead Sea was the best for medicine. Later scientists would learn that bitumen also has antimicrobial and biocidal properties and that the bitumen from the Dead Sea contains sulfur, also a biocidal agent.

While different cultures had their own names for bitumen—it was esir in Sumeria and sayali in Iraq—the 10th-century Persian physician Rhazes made the earliest known use of the word mumia for the substance, after mum, which means wax, referring to its stickiness. By the 11th century the Persian physician Avicenna used the word mumia to refer specifically to medicinal bitumen. We now call the embalmed ancient Egyptian dead “mummies” because when Europeans first saw the black stuff coating these ancient remains, they assumed it to be this valuable bitumen, or mumia.

The word mumia became double in meaning, referring both to the bitumen that flowed from nature and to the dark substance found on these ancient Egyptians (which may or may not have actually been bitumen).

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Links :-

https://www.sciencehistory.org/distillations/mummies-and-the-usefulness-of-death