Egyptian Mumia: The Sixteenth Century Experience and Debate

Abstract

By the sixteenth century Egyptian mummies, usually in broken pieces or powder, could be found in the shops of all European apothecaries as a drug for prescriptions. That the embalmed bodies of ancient Egyptians, and even the mummified bodies of those more recently dead, became a valued drug was due to a complicated and confusing process of transference and substitution involving originally the use of bituminous products in medicine.' It was also in the sixteenth century that physicians and scholars began to question the value of as a drug and to protest its use in medicine. They pointed out errors in translations and interpretations by medieval translators which had caused the change from bitumen to embalmed or desiccated bodies, ancient or contemporary. The use of bituminous materials in medicine is very old. In the Fertile Crescent area such bituminous products early gained prominence for their healing value. In the medieval centuries it was especially the scant and precious seepage of black rock-asphalt or pissasphalt from a mountain in the territory of Darabjerd in Persia that gained a great reputation among the Arabic peoples for its therapeutic properties, particularly when applied to broken limbs or used as an antidote for poisons. Given the local name of mumiya (mum = wax), this appellation was to lead eventually to the use of mumia for a drug in Latin and to mummy for an embalmed Egyptian corpse in English. Although described in early Arabic literature, the geographical location of this Persian source of medicinal bitumen was to become known to Europeans only in the writings of travelers in the early modern period.2

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