Europeans were so fond of eating mummies to treat diseases that it was recorded in the Compendium of Materia Medica

Written by Su Chengyu

Believe it or not, eating mummies was a popular practice in civilized Europe for centuries.

Since the Middle Ages, Europeans have believed in a prescription that crushes mummies covered with ointment, makes them into medicine and takes them to cure any disease from headaches to the Black Death.

This idea probably comes from the fact that the mummification process looks like it has medicinal properties. In addition to the thick bandages on Egyptian mummies, they are also coated with a layer of "ointment", which is a natural asphalt from the Dead Sea. Since ancient times, the Dead Sea has been famous for its salt and asphalt production.

A natural asphalt in France

The so-called natural asphalt is a semi-solid formed by the evaporation and oxidation of petroleum. Its viscosity is similar to that of cold honey and can be used for waterproofing and anti-corrosion.

Dead Sea Asphalt

Compared with ordinary asphalt, the main components are not much different, all of which are composed of naphthalene aromatics, polar aromatic compounds, saturated hydrocarbons, asphaltenes and organic sulfides. Just looking at the ingredients, you can tell that it has no medicinal value...

However, most natural asphalt has been naturally evaporated and oxidized, and generally no longer contains any toxins. If you eat ordinary asphalt instead, it will not be used for medicinal purposes and you will die early.

In the Middle Ages, a Persian physician named Ibn Sina claimed that eating mumia could cure a wide range of diseases, including abscesses, rashes, fractures, concussions, paralysis, etc. It could also detoxify.

Ibn Sina's Medical Works

Note that “mumia” refers to natural asphalt, not “mummy,” which is the origin of our modern English word “mummy.”

In other words, it was a Persian who first proposed eating natural asphalt, rather than letting people eat mummies directly... As for why Europeans made a mistake and took the wrong medicine for centuries, this will be explained later.

However, this prescription does not only contain mummy ingredients, but also a mixture of other herbs. It feels similar to Chinese patent medicine, and there is always a herbal ingredient that can cure the disease... Of course, if you think the taste is bad, the doctor recommends adding some wine, milk or butter.

About 500 years later, this practice was passed on to Western European medical literature. If you have the mood and time to look up early European medical works, from manuscripts to printed books, you will find that there are a lot of examples of using natural asphalt for medicinal purposes in Britain, France, and Germany.

These examples do not appear once in a certain place in the text, but appear repeatedly, occupying a large part of the book. At least in the literature, Europeans did not mistake the word mumia.

But later a doctor came forward and said that the use of mummies for medicinal purposes was unsafe. The doctor's name was Ambroise Paré, a French surgeon in Europe during the Renaissance.

In the paper, he wrote:

"This wicked medicine does not help the patient at all. I have tried it a hundred times, and according to the veterinarian's witness, he himself tried it, when he imported a Jewish medicine from Egypt and took some according to their advice. But then many troublesome symptoms appeared, such as pain in the heart or stomach, vomiting, and a bad smell in the mouth..."

From the above passage, we can see that the patients themselves would complain that this natural asphalt is not good enough after taking it.

Under normal circumstances, the natural asphalt prescribed by the doctor is of little use, but at least it will not cause any serious problems if taken, and may even provide some psychological comfort.

But as more and more people took the medicine, they found it useless, so an idea came up:

Natural asphalt is useless when eaten. It must be taken from dead people, that is, mummies, to be useful...

Medicine jar for mumia

From this point on, things started to go wrong. At first, everyone ate mummies in secret, after all, digging up someone's tomb was something that was not acceptable.

Later, more and more people knew about eating mummies, and the demand for mummies also increased. However, mummies are not like sweet potatoes that can be harvested every other season. The number of mummies buried in the tomb is limited, and the more they are dug, the less there will be. When all the mummies in Egypt were dug up, they started to dig up those in Syria. Naturally, the Egyptian government banned the trade of mummies.

Mass graves for mummies

What to do if there are not enough mummies to eat? An Alexandrian Jew came up with a plan to make mummies himself. He collected the bodies of slaves in Egypt, and possibly other people. Then he filled them with asphalt, bandaged them, and dried them in the sun to make almost one-to-one realistic mummies.

European medical texts also began to replace natural asphalt with mummies, and mumia became mummy. In order to make mummies more delicious, the medieval Swiss doctor Paracelsus designed a variety of "mummy ointments" and a "mummy syrup". After his death, this way of eating was still popular for a century.

Egyptian mummification scene

How popular is it? The rumor of eating mummies spread to China... Li Shizhen of the Ming Dynasty once reprinted the relevant rumor in his Compendium of Materia Medica:

"Compendium of Materia Medica" Volume 52 "Human Section": "Shizhen said: According to Tao Jiucheng's "Records of Stopping Farming", there are people in the Kingdom of Mecca who are 70 or 80 years old and are willing to sacrifice their lives to help others. They never eat or drink, but only bathe their bodies and eat honey. Their feces and urine are all honey. After death, the people of the country bury them in stone coffins, which are still filled with honey, and the year and month are engraved on the coffins and buried. After a hundred years, the coffins are opened and the coffins are sealed. If someone breaks a limb, they will take a little and heal immediately. Although there are not many people there, they are also called honey people. I wonder if Tao's record is true? I will attach it to the end of the volume for your reference."

The honey man mentioned here is mummy syrup.

From this point on, the focus shifted from natural asphalt to human mummies, not necessarily Egyptian mummies, as long as the body was filled with asphalt. Later, Europeans had long forgotten the original meaning of the word mumia, and it became a general term for medicinal flesh.

Paul Dominique Philippoteaux (c. 1891) The Examination of the Mummy

By the 19th century, only the British royal family could afford to eat real Egyptian mummies. For them, only the noble pharaoh mummies were worthy of their status, and only kings were worthy of eating kings.

Someone asked what the mummy smelled like. The literature said it tasted a bit spicy and bitter, and also had a fragrance.

Who remembers now that the Persians said they ate natural bitumen, not mummies? But it doesn't matter.

This article is authorized to be reproduced from the WeChat public account "Bring Science Home".

Special Tips

1. Go to the "Featured Column" at the bottom of the menu of the "Fanpu" WeChat public account to read a series of popular science articles on different topics.

2. Fanpu provides a function to search articles by month. Follow the official account and reply with the four-digit year + month, such as "1903", to get the article index for March 2019, and so on.