OlfactionaryEuropean Royalty Used to Eat and Wear Ground-Up Egyptian Mummies
For roughly six centuries, powdered mummy — mumia — was a genuine European medicine cabinet staple, believed to cure everything from headaches to tumors. Catherine de' Medici reportedly sent expeditions to loot Egyptian tombs specifically to source it.
From battlefield resin to medicine cabinet
Mumia originates from the Arabic mūmiyā, a bituminous mineral pitch used in traditional medicine. Somewhere along the way the term shifted to mean the ground remains of actual embalmed mummies, imported into Europe as a medicinal powder from roughly the 12th through the 18th centuries. It was prescribed for headaches, ulcers, bruising, and tumors, marketed on exactly the exoticism and mystery you'd expect from ground-up ancient royalty.
Royal demand, real looting
King Francis I of France reportedly carried a sachet of mumia on his person as protection against injury. Catherine de' Medici — the same queen whose Florentine perfumer, Renato Bianco, helped found the perfume industry at Grasse — is chronicled as having sent an expedition to the tombs at Saqqara in 1549 specifically to source mummy remains for medicine.
The pigment nobody expected
Mumia had one more afterlife: ground into a rich brown pigment called "mummy brown," used by European painters into the 19th century, until supplies of actual mummies to grind became too scarce — and the practice too widely known — for artists to stomach.