Mummia

This began a period of lucrative trade between Egypt and Europe, and suppliers substituted rare mummia exudate with entire mummies, either embalmed or desiccated.

The etymologies of both English mummia and mummy derive from Medieval Latin mumia, which transcribes Arabic mūmiyā "a kind of bitumen used medicinally; a bitumen-embalmed body" from mūm "wax (used in embalming)", which descend from Persian mumiya and mum.

In modern English usage, mummy commonly means "embalmed body" as distinguished from mummia "a medicine" in historical contexts.

The medicinal use of bituminous mummia has a parallel in Ayurveda: shilajit or silajit (from Sanskrit shilajatu "rock-conqueror") or mumijo (from Persian mūmiyā "wax") is "A name given to various solid or viscous substances found on rock in India and Nepal … esp.

[9] The Greek physician Pedanius Dioscorides' c. 50–70 De Materia Medica ranked bitumen from the Dead Sea as medicinally superior to the pissasphalt from Apollonia (Illyria), both of which were considered to be an equivalent substitute for the scarce and expensive Persian mumiya.

[10] During the Crusades, European soldiers learned firsthand of the drug mummia, which was considered to have great healing powers in cases of fracture and rupture.

[11] The demand for mummia increased in Europe and since the supply of natural bitumen from Persia and the Dead Sea was limited, the search for a new source turned to the tombs of Egypt.

[13] Two 12th century Italian examples: Gerard of Cremona, mistakenly translated Arabic mumiya as "the substance found in the land where bodies are buried with aloes by which the liquid of the dead, mixed with the aloes, is transformed and it is similar to marine pitch",[14] and the physician Matthaeus Platearius said "Mumia is a spice found in the sepulchers of the dead.... That is best which is black, ill-smelling, shiny, and massive".

"[16] The third step in misinterpreting mummia was to substitute the blackened flesh of an entire mummy for the hardened bituminous materials from the interior cavities of the cadavers.

[18] The Italian surgeon Giovanni da Vigo (1450–1525) defined mumia as "The flesh of a dead body that is embalmed, and it is hot and dry in the second [grade], and therefore it has virtue to incarne [i.e., heal over] wounds and to staunch blood", and included it in his list of essential drugs.

The German physician Oswald Croll (1563–1609) said mumia was "not the liquid matter which is found in the Egyptian sepulchers," but rather "the flesh of a man that perishes a violent death, and kept for some time in the air", and gave a detailed recipe for making tincture of mumia from the corpse of a young red-haired man, who had been hanged, bludgeoned on the breaking wheel, exposed to the air for days, then cut into small pieces, sprinkled with powdered myrrh and aloes, soaked in wine, and dried.

The French naturalist Pierre Belon (1517–1564) concluded that the Arab physicians, from whom the western writers derived their knowledge of mumia, had actually referred to the pissasphalt of Dioscorides, which had been misconstrued by the translators.

The British chemist and painter Arthur Herbert Church described the use of mummia for making "mummy brown" oil paint: 'Mummy,' as a pigment, is inferior to prepared, but superior to raw, asphalt, inasmuch as it has been submitted to a considerable degree of heat, and has thereby lost some of its volatile hydrocarbons.

A London colourman informs me that one Egyptian mummy furnishes sufficient material to satisfy the demands of his customers for twenty years.