Mummies are indeed fascinating, but as with many other ancient things in our world, some have been misused and exploited. If you thought that these preserved humans and animals from ancient Egypt were all kept in museums and studied, think again. Mummies have had many uses, and some you may find to be quite disturbing.
Intrigued? Click on to learn about the surprising uses for mummies.
Europeans are no stranger to cannibalistic health practices. Consuming flesh, bone, or blood, in various forms, and for various purposes, is well documented in European history until the 18th century.
Mummy, mummia, or mumia (the bitumen used to embalm mummies) was sold to treat several ailments, including bruising. It was often applied to the skin or powdered and added to drinks.
English philosopher and statesman Francis Bacon wrote about the healing power of mummy bitumen, saying that “mummy has great force in staunching of blood.”
Yes, this was a thing in 19th-century Britain. The trend began in 1821, after a man named Giovanni Belzoni held a public mummy unwrapping as part of an exhibition of Egyptian antiquities in London.
The event was a success, and not long after, London surgeon and scholar Thomas Pettigrew started holding his own unrollings and charging people to watch.
The idea spread to the upper class, who started to throw their own private unwrapping parties. Hosts would often use mummies from their own collection.
In the 18th century, a color known as “mummy brown” was all the rage among European artists. This is Martin Drolling's ‘Interior of a Kitchen,’ painted using the pigment.
Mummy brown was actually made from ground-up mummies (both feline and human), and it was a favorite among the British Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood painters, as well as the likes of French artist Eugène Delacroix and others.
And we’re not just talking about fully wrapped mummies. Often, body parts such as heads, feet, and hands were put on display. These would often be placed in glass domes on mantelpieces.
Mummies were not only used in private homes,—they’d also be used to attract customers to shops. In 1886, one Chicago candy store is said to have had one on display, which they claimed to be the “Pharaoh’s daughter who discovered Moses in the bulrushes.”
The evidence on this one might not be enough to confirm it, but some scholars claim that mummy wrappings were used as paper when there was a shortage in paper supply in 19th-century America.
According to the book ‘Mummies in Nineteenth Century America: Ancient Egyptians as Artifacts’ (2009), mummy wrapping was also used by “shopkeepers, grocers, and butchers, who used [them] for wrapping paper” during the American Civil War.
This claim is likely to have been a product of writer Mark Twain’s imagination. In his 1869 book ‘The Innocents Abroad,’ Twain claims that mummies were used as fuel for Egyptian locomotives.
As part of the show, the mummy would interact with the audience and answer their questions. Who would have thought Egyptian mummies were proficient in English, right?
According to National Museums Liverpool, in 1890 one company imported an estimated 180,000 mummified cats, weighing 19.5 tons, which were then sold at auction.
In 1867, a jar with the label “Remains found under the stake of Joan of Arc, virgin of Orleans,“ was found in a pharmacy in Paris. The French heroine was burned at the stake in 1431.
It was accepted by the Catholic Church that this was indeed authentic and therefore a religious relic, and it was even put on display at a museum. Joan of Arc was canonized in 1920.
Except, in 2007 forensic tests found that the contents of the jar were actually a cat’s thigh bone and a human rib belonging to an Egyptian mummy. Plus, these predated Joan of Arc by thousands of years.
Padihershef (pictured), one of the first mummies to be brought into North America, arrived at Massachusetts General Hospital in 1823, gifted by the city of Boston.
The mummy is still on display at the Ether Dome amphitheater, where the first public demonstration of surgery under anesthesia took place in 1846.
Sources: (Mental Floss) (Britannica) ('Mummies in Nineteenth Century America: Ancient Egyptians as Artifacts') (BBC) (National Museums Liverpool) (The New York Times)
