The Victorians loved themselves a good Ancient Egyptian mummy, but it turns out that 16th and 17th century Europeans did too — as ingestible medicine. But let me not get ahead of myself.
First, one must acknowledge the enormous usage of mummies that Victorians did indeed employ. Starting in the 16th century, “mummy brown” became prized by artists for its transparency — artists enjoyed the way it produced flesh-tones and shadows, adding a glazed look. The oozing pigment you see coming out of this tube has organic origins. The Victorian Pre-Raphaelites used mummy brown a great deal in their works, although art historians debate which paintings in particular used it. Consensus seems to agree that the second picture, _Interior of a Kitchen_, from 1815 by Martin Drilling, has a lot of the sepia luminosity of the “mummy brown” paint.
But far more fascinating is the European consumption of mummies that mainly preceded the Victorian era. By the 1500s — and after, as the third image of an apothecary jar of “mumia” from the 1700s shows — shoppers could purchase mummies ground into powder or broken in pieces for medicinal purposes. Egypt was considered exotic, and Medieval alchemical and magical practices were thought to have a strong tradition coming from the age of the Pharaohs. Then, too, there was a funny translation error that might have fueled mummies-as-medicine. Bitumen, which occurs naturally but we think of as pitchy asphalt, had long been considered a curative for staunching wounds in Ancient medicine. The Persian word for it was “mumia,” and — you see where I am going — Europeans gradually substituted the word “mumia” for the blackened coatings of embalming on Ancient Egyptian corpses, and then finally a 12th-century guy called Gerard of Cremona settled it up by stating that “mumia” (eventually “mummy”) was the stuff from Ancient Egypt that was made up of aloes mixed with “the liquid of the dead” and turned into pitch.
Demand for Ancient Egypts’ mummies eventually grew so high that Egyptian vendors began a lucrative trade in fake mummies, made of camels or recent corpses. . . . Hungry, anyone?
Source(s): _Distillations_ from the Science History Institute_, Mariel Carr, Oct 12, 2014, “Mummies and the Usefulness of Death”. _Florida State University, Department of Art History_, “Mummy Brown”, August 16, 2019.
