mwmiyā

The word 'mummy' reaches English through Medieval Latin mumia, from Arabic mūmiyā (مومياء), which derived from Persian mūm (wax, bitumen). Arabic mūmiyā originally referred to bitumen — the natural asphalt or mineral pitch that seeps from the ground in the Middle East, particularly around the Dead Sea — and was used in medieval Arabic medicine as a healing substance for wounds, fractures, and various internal complaints. When Arab physicians and travelers in Egypt began examining the preserved ancient bodies found in tombs, they noted that many of them had a dark, resinous coating — the result of the liberal use of resins, oils, and bitumen-like substances in the embalming process — and called the bodies 'mūmiyā' because the preservative substance resembled the medicinal bitumen they already knew. The conflation of the preserving resin with medicinal bitumen was medically significant: from at least the eleventh century CE, ground mummy — the powdered substance of ancient preserved Egyptian bodies — was sold as a medical treatment throughout the Middle East and Europe.

The mummy-as-medicine trade was among the more remarkable episodes in the history of pharmacy. From the eleventh through the seventeenth centuries, ground Egyptian mummy was a standard ingredient in European pharmacopoeias, prescribed for a remarkable range of conditions including epilepsy, vertigo, bruising, paralysis, and nausea. The demand was so great that a trade in counterfeit mummies developed: when authentic ancient Egyptian mummies became scarce or expensive, dealers substituted the bodies of recently dead Egyptians dried in the desert sun, sometimes coating them with bitumen and resins to simulate the ancient appearance. The problem of mummy authentication — distinguishing genuine ancient mummies from fraudulent recent corpses — was a recognized practical issue in medieval and Renaissance apothecary practice. The English physician Francis Bacon in the seventeenth century was still discussing the medicinal uses of mummy, even as skeptics were beginning to question both the efficacy and the ethics of the trade.

The process by which Egyptian bodies were actually preserved — mummification — was substantially misunderstood in the Arab and medieval periods precisely because the word 'mumia' focused attention on the surface coating rather than the core technique of desiccation with natron. The actual Egyptian embalming process involved the removal of internal organs, the extraction of the brain through the nostrils, the treatment of the body cavity with natron and resins, the wrapping in linen bandages, and the application of protective amulets and inscribed texts. The entire process took seventy days and was performed by specialized embalmers (the 'wt-priests') at structures called 'per-nefer' (house of beauty). The Egyptians' own term for the preserved body was 'sah' — a transfigured being, a body prepared to house the soul in eternity — a term that understood the preserved body as a spiritual transformation rather than a pharmacological product. The Arabic mūmiyā, focused on the visible bituminous substance, displaced the Egyptian theological understanding with a pharmacological one.

The word 'mummy' acquired its current primary meaning — the preserved body of an ancient Egyptian — in English in the seventeenth century, and the Egyptomania that followed Napoleon's campaign and especially the opening of Egyptian tombs in the nineteenth century made 'mummy' a central term of popular culture. Victorian 'mummy unwrapping parties' — social events at which a mummy's bandages were publicly removed — represent perhaps the most bizarre expression of this fascination. The figure of the mummy in horror fiction, beginning with Théophile Gautier's 'The Mummy's Foot' (1840) and culminating in Universal Pictures' The Mummy (1932), transformed the ancient preserved body into a supernatural revenant — a being that refuses the permanence of death, that returns to exact vengeance for the disturbance of its eternal rest. The Arabic pharmacological term for a medicinal bituminous substance has become, through the mediation of Egyptian antiquarianism and Gothic horror, the English word for both the ancient preserved body and the cinematic monster.