mummies

The Persian mūm meant wax, and Arab physicians extended it to mūmiyā for bitumen, the dark mineral pitch that seeped from hillsides in Persia and was prized as medicine for broken bones and internal bleeding. Medieval Arab medical writers, including Ibn Sina in the 11th century, described mūmiyā as a substance both mineral and remedial. The connection to Egyptian embalmed bodies came from appearance: the dark resinous coatings on wrapped corpses resembled the same pitch.

Venetian merchants were importing ground Egyptian mummy material into Europe as early as the 12th century, selling it through apothecary shops under the Latin name mumia. By the 14th century, French had settled on momie for both the substance and the preserved body. English borrowed mummy from French by the 1390s, and the plural mummies appears in early 16th-century travel accounts written by merchants who visited Egyptian tombs and reported on what they found.

John Sanderson, an English merchant, visited Egypt in 1585 and shipped mummy parts back to London for the medical trade, and his account uses mummies as an ordinary commercial plural. The word was not exotic yet. It named a category of goods, like spices or pigments, and the bodies in question were inventory rather than antiquities. That changed slowly through the 17th century as Egyptian archaeology began to treat the preserved dead as historical specimens rather than pharmaceutical raw material.

The Victorian era made mummies into celebrities. Unwrapping parties in Britain and Europe, at which purchased Egyptian mummies were unrolled before invited audiences by physicians or gentlemen scholars, gave the word its theatrical shimmer. Today mummies is a scientific term applied equally to Egyptian linen-wrapped bodies, Andean freeze-dried individuals, and Irish bog bodies, all united by the accident of preservation and the single Arabic-derived word that names them all.