# Ancient Egyptian Mummies: Strange Uses in Everyday Life

*History & War · Eleanor Hartwell · 2026-10-16*

## TL;DR

From roughly the 16th century into the early 1900s, ancient Egyptian mummies were consumed as medicine under the name mumia, ground into a brown pigment used by painters, spread on fields as fertilizer, and unwrapped before paying crowds in Victorian Britain. Demand was commercial, not scientific, and it faded only as supply and attitudes changed.

## Key facts

- Mumia, a medicinal powder derived from mummified human remains, was stocked by European apothecaries for centuries and prescribed for bruises and other complaints.
- Mummy brown, a pigment made from ground mummified remains, was used by European artists from the 16th century onward.
- Victorian audiences in Britain paid to watch mummy unwrappings, and London surgeon Thomas Pettigrew turned the practice into ticketed public events.
- Padihershef, an ancient Egyptian mummy, arrived at Massachusetts General Hospital in 1823 and became a public attraction in Boston.
- The relics venerated as those of Joan of Arc were later determined to be an ancient Egyptian mummy's rib and a cat's femur, not remains of the French saint.

## Europe Ate Its Mummies: The Strange Career of Mumia

Picture the ancient Egyptian mummies we treat as sacred today. Now picture a European apothecary grinding one into powder and selling it by the spoonful. That is not a horror film. It is medical history. The historian Richard Sugg has documented that right up until the late 18th century, the human body was a widely accepted remedy across Europe, and the treatments on offer included flesh, bone, blood, and even the moss scraped from human skulls.

The star product went by the name *mumia*. The word carried a double meaning, since it also referred to the black bitumen that mummies were thought to be preserved with. Sold as a powder, mumia was rubbed onto the skin or stirred into drinks to treat bruises and a long list of other complaints. Some accounts list its uses as a blood thinner, a painkiller, a cough suppressant, an anti-inflammatory, a menstrual regulator, and a wound healer. Whether every one of those six indications held up is another matter, but the trade itself was real and it was booming.

And that is where the story turns. Demand for genuine mummy outstripped supply, so according to accounts of the period, counterfeiters stepped in. Instead of ancient Egyptian remains, buyers were sold bodies made from executed criminals, slaves, beggars, and camels, dried, treated, and passed off as the real thing. It is the same instinct we see in the market for fake medicine today, just in older packaging.

## Victorian Mummy Unwrapping Parties: When the Dead Became Entertainment

By the 19th century, the medicine had run its course and the spectacle had taken its place. Ancient Egyptian mummies, once ground into powder for European apothecaries, now came out of their cases in front of paying crowds. The Victorians turned the unwrapping of a mummy into a party.

It started, by most accounts, with a man who had spent his early career in a circus. Giovanni Belzoni was a former strongman before he became an explorer of Egyptian antiquities, and in 1821 he staged a public mummy unwrapping in London as part of an exhibition of Egyptian objects near Piccadilly Circus. By one account, more than 2,000 people came through the doors to watch. That attendance figure and the exact staging details are reported rather than firmly documented, but the event itself left a mark on the room.

Sitting in that audience was Thomas Pettigrew, a London surgeon and academic. What he saw clearly stuck with him, because he soon began running his own public unwrappings, ticketed, often paired with a lecture that walked the crowd through the linen, the resins, the amulets. The line between scholarship and showmanship blurred, and Pettigrew stood right on it. In 1834 he published *A History of Egyptian Mummies*, widely regarded as the first book devoted to mummy studies. The man who unwrapped bodies for paying audiences also wrote the field's founding text.

In a single generation, the mummy went from apothecary shelf to drawing-room spectacle. The ancient dead had become an evening's entertainment.

## Mummy Brown: The Paint Pigment Made from the Dead

It sounds like a ghost story you'd tell around a campfire, but mummy brown was reportedly a real product sold to working artists, and it was made by grinding up ancient Egyptian mummies into powder. From the 16th century onward, this pigment was a popular choice in European studios, prized for the warm, transparent brown it gave to shadows and flesh tones. The color had a richness that other earth pigments couldn't quite match, and for centuries, nobody in the art world seemed bothered by where it came from.

According to the accounts that have survived, several famous names reached for it. Eugène Delacroix, the French Romantic painter, is often cited as a user, and the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood reportedly favored mummy brown for its glowing, lifelike warmth. The English portraitist Sir William Beechey is sometimes mentioned too, though his connection to the pigment is far less certain than the others. What is clear is that many painters had no idea what they were dipping their brushes into. They thought they were buying a rare, exotic earth tone, not the remains of a person who had been dead for thousands of years.

Then came the moment of discovery, and for one painter, it hit hard. Edward Burne-Jones, the English artist tied to the Pre-Raphaelite circle, learned that his tube of mummy brown was exactly what the name said. His reaction was not to shrug it off. He took the tube out to his backyard and held a small funeral for it, burying the paint in the ground as if it were a body. It is a strange, almost tender image: a Victorian painter standing over a tiny grave, laying to rest a color he had once loved.

That small ceremony says something about the shift in how people saw these objects. A pigment that had been mixed and sold without a second thought became, in that moment, something that deserved a burial. The tube of paint stopped being a tube of paint. It became a person again.

## Decor, Fertilizer, and a Chicago Candy Shop Mummy

By the 19th century, an ancient Egyptian mummy was less a sacred object than a piece of luggage. Wealthy travelers on the grand tour of Egypt bought them as souvenirs and carried them home, where they turned up in guest rooms, in studies, and sometimes in bedrooms. The writer Gustave Flaubert kept a mummy's foot on his desk, which is the kind of detail that tells you exactly how ordinary the objects had become.

They showed up in shops too. According to one account, a Chicago candy shop displayed a mummy in 1886, billing it as the "Pharaoh's daughter who found Moses in the reeds," all to pull paying customers through the door.

Long before any of that, ancient Egypt had produced animal mummies in staggering numbers. Millions of them were made as offerings to the gods. Ibises and baboons were sacred to Thoth, birds of prey to Horus, and cats to Bastet. The cats alone were so plentiful that, by one account, late 19th-century English companies bought Egyptian cat mummies for agriculture. A single firm reportedly purchased around 180,000 cat mummies weighing 19 tons, ground them up, and spread them as fertilizer across English fields. One of the skulls from that shipment is said to sit today in the natural history section of the British Museum.

The civilization that wrapped its dead with such care saw those same dead shipped abroad by the ton, and a candy shop in Chicago saw no reason not to put one in the window.

## Joan of Arc's "Relics" Were Actually an Ancient Egyptian Mummy

Joan of Arc was burned at the stake in 1431, and her executioners made sure nothing of her body survived. They burned the remains a second time, then cast what was left into the Seine. So when a jar turned up in 1867 in the attic of a Paris pharmacy, labeled as what was left of Joan of Arc after she was put to the stake, it should have raised eyebrows. It didn't.

The Church accepted the jar as genuine. It was later put on display in a museum run by the Archbishopric of Tours, where visitors could look at what they believed were the mortal traces of the Maid of Orléans. For decades, nobody questioned it.

Then, in 2007, forensic specialist Philippe Charlier ran tests on the contents. What he found had nothing to do with a 15th-century French peasant girl. The material inside the jar was thousands of years older than Joan. It was, in fact, a human rib taken from an ancient Egyptian mummy, along with the femur of a cat.

Think about that for a second. A sacred relic, venerated by the faithful and displayed in a church-run museum, turned out to be exactly the kind of thing that had been ground up, sold, and traded across Europe for centuries. The same ancient Egyptian mummies that had been eaten as medicine, mixed into paint, and ground into fertilizer had somehow ended up sealed in a jar and rebranded as the remains of a saint.

Nobody knows who assembled the forgery or when. What is clear is that the jar was found in 1867, at a moment when Europe's appetite for mummy material was still very much alive. Whether the forger was a cynic looking to cash in on Joan's fame, or simply someone working with the materials at hand, the result was the same: a relic that fooled the Church, the public, and generations of visitors to Tours.

It took modern forensic science, more than five centuries after Joan's death, to finally reveal what was really inside the jar. Not a martyr. Not a saint. A rib from an ancient Egyptian mummy and a cat's leg bone, sitting quietly in a Paris attic for who knows how long before anyone thought to label them.

## Padihershef: The Mummy That Helped Build a Hospital

Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston was the site of the first public surgery performed under modern anesthesia, carried out in 1846 in the operating amphitheater that became known as the Ether Dome. That alone would be enough history for one building. But the hospital also holds something you would never expect to find in a medical institution: an ancient Egyptian mummy named Padihershef.

As the story goes, the well-preserved Padihershef arrived at Massachusetts General Hospital in 1823 as a gift from the city of Boston, reportedly first donated by a Dutch merchant in the early 19th century. The merchant is said to have bought the mummy to impress his mother-in-law, and it was later handed to the then-fledgling hospital to help it raise funds.

Padihershef went on display at Bay Doggett's art store in Boston, where visitors paid $0.25 to see one of the first Egyptian mummies shown in the United States. The mummy then reportedly set out on a year-long East Coast tour to bring in more money for the hospital, and on October 16, 1846, it is said to have been present at the Ether Dome for the surgery that made medical history. Today, the mummy is still there.


## Frequently asked questions

**What was mumia and how was it used as medicine in Europe?**

Mumia was ground mummy material sold by apothecaries in Europe, applied to the skin for bruises or stirred into drinks. Historian Richard Sugg notes that until the late 18th century the human body itself, flesh, bone, blood, and skull moss included, was a widely accepted remedy across the continent.

**Why did Victorian England hold public mummy unwrapping parties?**

By the 19th century, ancient Egyptian mummies had shifted from medicine to spectacle, and Victorians staged "mummy unwrapping" parties as entertainment. London surgeon Thomas Pettigrew turned the practice into ticketed public events, and in 1834 he published A History of Egyptian Mummies , the first substantial book on the subject.

**How was mummy brown paint made and which artists used it?**

From the 16th century, a pigment called mummy brown was ground from mummies and sold to European painters. Eugène Delacroix and the Pre-Raphaelites are often named among its users, though the full list of artists is debated. Edward Burne-Jones reportedly held a small backyard funeral for a tube of the paint once he learned what was in it.

**Was Joan of Arc's supposed relic actually an ancient Egyptian mummy?**

Yes. Joan of Arc was burned at the stake in 1431 and her ashes thrown into the Seine, yet in 1867 a jar labeled as her remains turned up in a Paris pharmacy attic and was displayed in a museum run by the Archbishopric of Tours. In 2007, forensic specialist Philippe Charlier found the contents were an Egyptian mummy's rib and a cat's femur.

**How were ancient Egyptian cat mummies used as fertilizer in England?**

Ancient Egypt mummified millions of animals as offerings, with cats sacred to the goddess Bastet. In the late 19th century, English companies bought cat mummies from Egypt for agriculture; according to one account, a single firm purchased roughly 180,000 cat mummies weighing 19 tons, ground them into fertilizer, and spread them across English fields.

**Who was Padihershef and why is he at Massachusetts General Hospital?**

Padihershef is a well-preserved ancient Egyptian mummy held at Massachusetts General Hospital, the Boston site of the first public surgery using modern anesthesia in 1846. As the story goes, the mummy arrived in 1823 as a gift from the city of Boston to help the young hospital raise funds, and it remains there today. Editorial note: Details that remain unconfirmed, including the exact quantities and specific dates of some commercial uses, are presented here as hedged or approximate rather than as settled fact.

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