Choosing what to eat has risen many levels among humanity’s priorities. And not without reason. Science has helped us understand how important it is to keep the body healthy, but like almost everything, there are diets and diets. While many are backed by studies and research, others are more a matter of faith. The menu has everything from rhino horn to dogs. Of course, none of this is like what happened in the past.

Disgusting food. Mumia, the product obtained from mummified corpses, was a medicinal substance consumed by rich and poor for centuries, available in pharmacies, and created from the remains of mummies brought to Europe from Egyptian tombs. The interesting thing about this extravagant story, which began in Europe in the 11th century, is that it all started from a mistake, or rather, a series of translation errors, as historian Karl Dannenfelt explains.

Mumia before Mumia. The word originally had a different meaning. Valued for its healing properties, mumia was a substance found on a single mountainside in Iran that oozed from the black rock asphalt. Named after the local word for beeswax, “mama,” the substance was used for a variety of medicinal purposes and gained a reputation throughout the Arab world for being expensive, valuable, and effective.

A misunderstanding. However, as Western Europeans became acquainted with the Islamic world and began to translate its texts, a translation error caused widespread confusion about the meaning of mummy. According to Dannenfelt, many translators in the 11th and 12th centuries incorrectly identified mummy as a substance that oozed from corpses preserved in Egyptian tombs.

The confusion arose from the word’s similarity to another word: mummy. Additionally, some ancient Egyptian mummies were embalmed with asphalt (science now knows only some mummies were made by this process), but Western Europeans, influenced by ancient finds in Egypt, accepted this concept, and mummy became associated with mummified bodies instead. from precious Iranian asphalt. You can imagine what happened next.

We accept the body as a healing property. And we must add to the whole equation the beginnings of what is called “medical cannibalism.” Until then human consumption conformed to the basic medical theories of the time, thus the first homeopathic ideas emerged and the ideas that “like” “cures like” emerged. For example, people ate crushed skulls for headaches. Or blood was drunk for blood diseases.

Another reason human remains were considered powerful was that they were thought to contain the spirit of the body from which they were removed. The “spirit” was seen as a very real part of the physiology that connected body and soul. Blood was particularly powerful in this context.

A jar used to store the mummy

Mummy recipe. According to this scenario, the inclusion of mummies in the diet was not that compelling, and a translation error would have led to their consumption. With the arrival of the Mumia, also called mummy at the time, doctors believed they had found a new source of medicinal products made from the human body. “Its properties”? For almost everything from headaches to heart attacks.

Suddenly, people began to loot Egyptian tombs not just for jewelry or pottery, but also for the bodies inside. Demand quickly outpaced supply, leading to a trade in fake mummies. In an effort to cash in on the trend, body snatchers and dealers began to turn fresh corpses, executed criminals, and enslaved people into “mummies.”

These corpses were then embalmed with salt and drugs, dried in ovens, and ground into a powder that pharmacists added to home remedies.

Egyptian mummy dealer (1875)

Mummies at the apothecary. By the 12th century, pharmacists were using crushed mummies for their supernatural medicinal properties. To give you an idea, mummies were used as prescription drugs for the next 500 years. In a world without antibiotics, doctors prescribed ground skulls, bones, and flesh to treat a variety of ailments, from headaches to reducing swelling to curing the plague.

Fresh meat. Years passed, and with it, beliefs passed. Some doctors thought that fresh flesh and blood had an extra vitality that long-dead mummies lacked. In fact, King of England II. Elites like Charles took medications made from human skulls after suffering seizures, and by 1909 doctors frequently used human skulls to treat neurological disorders.

I don’t know if wonder is the right word, but back then, mummies and eating fresh meat were the routine of the day, and food wasn’t uncommon for the royal family… for the royal family.

Parties with mummies. They occurred in the 19th century. Later, the “fashion” for consuming mummified bodies for their possessions was almost out of fashion, and we moved from performing autopsies on mummies for scientific purposes to holding banquets and “unpacking parties” in the Victorian era, where Egyptian corpses were unpacked in a simple act of entertainment. private parties.

In fact, the excitement of seeing the dried flesh and bones that emerged when the bandages were removed caused people to flock to these performances, whether in a private home or in the theater of a scientific society.

By the end of the 19th century the use of mummies had either disappeared completely or almost disappeared completely.

The end of a “different” medicine. As science progressed, cannibalistic treatments disappeared, but later examples of corpse medicine can always be found. Mummy was sold as medicine in a German medical catalogue at the beginning of the 20th century, and the last known attempt at blood ingestion on a scaffold was made in Germany in 1908.

The truth is, it wasn’t that long ago, and it’s almost always been the same mantra: When a body dies, we can do whatever we want with it.

Image | Paul Dominique Philippoteaux, Slices of Light, Martonkurucz, Brian Jeffery Beggerly, Félix Bonfils

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