20 NOVEMBER/DECEMBER 2019
their resins, oils, and aromatic substances not
only had the same consistency and color as
original Persian mumiya but also smelled better.
It was not always easy to acquire a mummy, so
less scrupulous Eastern merchants decided to
make their own. Apothecaries noticed a differ-
ence. As Guy de La Fontaine complained in 1564,
after his journey to Alexandria to acquire the
drug, the problem was that in many instances
the mummies were modern corpses treated to
resemble ancient mummies. A distinction was
then drawn between primary or true mumiya
and secondary or false mumiya.
The process of turning a recently deceased
human being into a persuasive facsimile of an
ancient Egyptian mummy was an unpleasant
one. Luis de Urreta, a Spanish monk in the Do-
minican Order, gives a detailed account of the
murderous and grim method used in his 1610
work Historia de los reynos de la Etiopía (His-
tory of the Kingdoms of Ethiopia). The procedure
consisted of repeatedly starving a captive and
giving him special “medications” before cut-
ting off his head as he slept. The body was then
drained of blood, filled with spices, wrapped in
hay, and buried for 15 days. After exhumation, it
dried in the sun for 24 hours. By the end of this
gruesome process, the flesh had darkened and
transformed. The monk described it as being
not only cleaner and finer than that of ancient
mummies but also more effective.
Not everyone sang the praises of mumiya as
a drug, regardless of whether it was “true” or
“false.” As early as 1582, the Frenchman Ambroise
Paré wrote in his Discours de la mumie, “the effect
of this malevolent drug is such that not only does
it do nothing whatsoever to improve patients, as
I have seen for myself on numerous occasions
among those forced to take it, but it also causes
them terrible stomach pains, a foul smell in the
mouth, and great vomiting, which are the origin
of disorders in the blood and even make it flow
from the vessels that contain it.”
Europeans used ground up mummies as
medicine, but they also used them in art. From
at least the 16th century, a pigment called
“mummy brown” was made from mummified
human remains and appeared on the palettes ofMUMMY
DUST
A Physical Dictionary,
published in 1657,
describes mumiya
as “like pitch:
some affirm it’s
taken out of old
Tombs, being the
embalming of dead
bodies.” German
Pharmacy Museum,
Heidelberg CastlePRISMA/ALBUM
STAR ATTRACTIONS
Throughout the 19th century, major archaeological museums in Europe strove
to gather impressive collections of Egyptian antiquities. Now held in the Spanish
National Archaeological Museum in Madrid, this Egyptian mummy of a woman
who lived in the Third Intermediate Period (circa 1070 b.c.- 664 b.c.) was acquired
by Eduardo Toda, the Spanish consul in Cairo between 1884 and 1886.
AKG/ALBUM