7 Surprising Uses for Mummies

It is well known that cats were highly valued and even worshipped in ancient Egypt as they were thought to bring good luck and protection to the home. One reason for their importance is Bastet, the ancient Egyptian goddess of protection. Bastet is often depicted as a woman with the head of a cat. Cats were so highly valued that they were mummified and buried just like humans. In 1888 the sale of cat mummies became a business when an Egyptian farmer uncovered a tunnel containing a massive number of them. They would be sold domestically and abroad as fertilizer, and countries such as England would participate in the practice.

The Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood was a group of painters who banded together in 1848 against the art of their time that they perceived as unimaginative and artificial. Their works are characterized not by their depiction of beauty and the ideal but by their depiction of the real. It does not get much more real than the use of ground-up Egyptian mummies in their paintings. Both human and feline mummies were used to create a brown paint called Mummy Brown, a pigment that is difficult to mimic. Mummified bodies were crucial to the manufacture of the paint color because of the chemicals used during the mummification process. By 1960 the process had largely ended due to the limited supply of mummies. I’m not even going to dig into the moral issues.

It was claimed by author Mark Twain that mummies had been used as fuel for locomotives. In his 1869 travel book called The Innocents Abroad, Twain describes the first railroad in Egypt. Because of the lack of trees and the price of coal, Twain claims that the Egyptians used mummies instead. He wrote, “[The fuel used] for the locomotive is composed of mummies three thousand years old, purchased by the ton or by the graveyard for that purpose.” Could mummies be the next frontier of biofuel? Probably not.

While this may potentially be a myth, some believe that due to a paper shortage in the 19th century, Americans used mummy wrappings instead. Isaac Augustus Stanwood, who was involved in the paper industry, supposedly imported mummies from Egypt and used the linen wrappings to create paper. Mummy paper would have been used as intended and, according to Mummies in Nineteenth-Century America (2009), was also used to make grocery bags during the American Civil War. If you went to a grocery store today and asked for mummy bags, I wonder how much that would cost…

It is questionable as to whether some religious relics are legitimate. This is not to say that all religious relics are illegitimate. However, in the case of the supposed relics of Joan of Arc found in 1867, the relics were proven to be fake—and made of Egyptian mummies. In 1867 a pharmacist found a jar in an attic in Paris. He claimed that its contents were relics of the French heroine, who was later canonized as a saint by the Roman Catholic Church in 1920. Forensic tests taken in 2006, however, suggest that the remains found in the jar date back hundreds of years before Joan of Arc was even born. While Joan of Arc fought for France in the 15th century, the remains date back to before the Common Era. In fact, tests suggest that the remains are from an Egyptian mummy and a cat. I would say that’s still a pretty good find.

This is not your typical party. During the Victorian era, wealthy members of society threw parties where the main attraction was…unwrapping mummies? The English surgeon Thomas Pettigrew made this practice popular as he transitioned from unwrapping mummies for scientific benefit to unwrapping mummies for entertainment. The practice fell out of favor when people agreed that these human remains should be treated with more respect. Mummies would still be unwrapped for scientific purposes until the invention of the X-ray, which makes it possible to study a mummy without removing its wrap.

Ground-up mummies were used as a prescribed medicine as early as the 16th century. The medicine was called “mumia” and could be ingested by swallowing or rubbed into an injury. It was believed that mumia could treat ailments such as coughs and epilepsy. Mumia was even used by royalty such as King Francis I of France and King Charles II of England to protect their health. Because of the high demand, some took to digging up Egyptian graves and tomb robbing for the valuable bodies. This was clearly cannibalism, but many people during this time did not view the ingestion of ground-up bodies negatively. It was just medicine to them. The practice largely died out in the 18th century, but some late examples can be found.