mummies
were not accorded the respect that they deserved from the European
elites, During that period of time, the well-preserved remains of
ancient Egyptians were routinely ground into a powder and consumed as a
medicinal remedy.
During the Victorian era of the 1900s, Napoleon’s conquest of Egypt threw open the Gates of Egypt’s history for the Europeans.
At that time, mummies were not accorded the respect that they deserved from the European elites and in fact.
mummies
could be purchased from street vendors (as shown in the picture) to be
used as the main event for parties and social gatherings that took place
in the 18th century
The elites of the era
would often hold “Mummy Unwrapping Parties”, which, as the name
suggests, had the main theme in which a Mummy would be unwrapped in
front of a boisterous audience, cheering and applauding at the same
time.
During that period of time, the
well-preserved remains of ancient Egyptians were routinely ground into a
powder and consumed as a medicinal remedy.
Indeed,
so popular was pulverized mummy that it even instigated a counterfeit
trade to meet demand, in which the flesh of beggars was passed off as
that of ancient mummified Egyptians.
As the
Industrial Revolution progressed, so Egyptian mummies were exploited for
more utilitarian purposes: huge numbers of human and animal mummies
were ground up and shipped to Britain and Germany for use as fertilizer.
Others
were used to create mummy brown pigment or were stripped of their
wrappings, which were subsequently exported to the US for use in the
paper-making industry.
The author Mark Twain even reported that mummies were burnt in Egypt as locomotive fuel.
As
the nineteenth century advanced, mummies became prized objects of
display, and scores of them were purchased by wealthy European and
American private collectors as tourist souvenirs
For
those who could not afford a whole mummy, disarticulated remains – such
as a head, hand, or foot – could be purchased on the black market and
smuggled back home.
So brisk was the trade-in
mummies to Europe that even after ransacking tombs and catacombs there
just were not enough ancient Egyptian bodies to meet the demand.
And
so fake mummies were fabricated from the corpses of the executed
criminals, the aged, the poor, and those who had died from hideous
diseases, by burying them in the sand or stuffing them with bitumen and
exposing them to the sun.
Mummy brown was
originally made in the 16th and 17th centuries from the white pitch,
myrrh, and the ground-up remains of Egyptian mummies, both human and
feline.
As it had good transparency, it could
be used for glazes, shadows, flesh tones, and shading. Artists believed
that when bitumen and mummified flesh were used in oil paint it wouldn’t
crack or dry.
Mummy Brown eventually ceased
being produced in its traditional form later in the 20th century when
the supply of available mummies was exhausted.
Mummia
or mummy is either a substance used in the embalming of mummies or a
powder made from ground mummies, used as a “medical preparation”.
Ancient
Egyptian mummy-making often utilized asphaltum (Persian: mumiya) as an
ingredient for filling the empty body cavities once the organs were
removed.
In the Middle Ages, the resin that had
been used on ancient Egyptian mummies was believed to have superior
medicinal and chemical value to regular asphaltum, and the resulting
demand for the ingredient caused the term to be applied to the dead
bodies required to harvest it as much as to the ingredient itself.
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