Egyptian mummies are rare because humans have been destroying them for thousands of years. Ancient tomb robbers, medieval pharmacists, Victorian party hosts, and even paint manufacturers all played a role in reducing what was once an enormous number of preserved bodies to the relatively small collection that survives today. The losses began almost as soon as mummies were entombed and continued well into the 20th century.
Tomb Robbing Started Almost Immediately
The destruction of mummies didn’t begin in modern times. In ancient Egypt, criminals plundered pyramids and underground burials within years, and sometimes within hours, of a body being sealed inside. In a society with a stark divide between rich and poor, tomb robbing was ubiquitous. Thieves were after gold, jewelry, and precious oils, but in the process they damaged or discarded the mummies themselves.
Looting happened consistently across ancient Egypt’s 3,000-year history, peaking during periods of political instability when central authority broke down. By the time modern archaeologists arrived, nearly every known royal tomb had already been emptied. Tutankhamun’s tomb, discovered in 1922, was remarkable precisely because it had somehow survived the robbers who had cleaned out virtually every other burial. Noble and royal tombs remained targets for theft not just during the pharaonic era but for centuries afterward, as successive civilizations moved through the region.
Centuries of Grinding Mummies Into Medicine
From the 12th century through the 17th century, European apothecaries sold ground-up mummy as a drug. The powdered remains were prescribed for ailments ranging from headaches to internal bleeding, and demand was high enough to sustain a continent-wide trade for roughly 500 years. The practice didn’t fully die out until the late 1700s.
Initially, suppliers shipped genuine Egyptian mummies to Europe. When those became harder to source, merchants began fabricating substitutes from recently dead bodies treated with chemicals to mimic the appearance of ancient remains. The scale of this trade is hard to quantify, but it was large enough that suppliers eventually struggled to find authentic mummies to meet demand. Hundreds of years of steady consumption turned an unknown but significant number of preserved ancient Egyptians into pharmaceutical products.
Victorian Unwrapping Parties
The 19th century brought a different kind of destruction. Wealthy Victorians treated mummies as entertainment. A host would purchase an actual mummy, invite friends to an elaborate dinner party, and ceremonially unwrap the body in front of guests. Some combined the event with a séance, playing into the era’s fascination with the occult and ancient Egyptian religion.
These weren’t just private curiosities. Thomas Pettigrew, a British surgeon with an interest in Egyptology, became famous for staging dramatic public unwrappings over two decades, performing them at venues like the Royal College of Surgeons and at high-society gatherings. One of his events drew such a crowd that the Archbishop of Canterbury couldn’t even get into the room. While some unwrappings were conducted with genuine scientific intent, the mummies were destroyed in the process regardless of the motivation. Once unwrapped and exposed to air, the remains deteriorated rapidly, and there was no protocol for preservation.
Mummies as Paint and Paper
Artists contributed to the toll in a surprisingly literal way. A pigment called “mummy brown” was manufactured from ground-up ancient Egyptians (and their mummified pets), mixed with white pitch and myrrh. The color ranged from burnt to raw umber and was popular enough that one major supplier, C. Roberson, didn’t discontinue it until 1964. The company’s managing director told Time magazine they had simply run out of mummies: “We might have a few odd limbs lying around somewhere, but not enough to make any more paint.”
There were also persistent 19th-century claims that mummies were used to make paper and even to fuel locomotives on Egyptian railways. American newspapers from the 1840s and 1850s reported that mummies were burned “by the cord” to power trains. Mark Twain repeated the claim humorously, joking about an engineer complaining that commoners “don’t burn worth a cent” and demanding a king be tossed into the firebox. Modern historians have largely debunked these stories. Egypt imported its coal from Britain through well-established supply chains, and the various accounts of mummy fuel and mummy paper contradict each other, lack verifiable details, and share the hallmarks of urban myths. Still, the stories reflect how casually mummies were treated as raw material rather than as irreplaceable artifacts.
Climate and Geography Destroyed the Rest
Not every mummy was lost to human hands. Egypt’s geography split preservation outcomes dramatically. Upper Egypt, the southern region, is extremely arid, and its dry desert conditions are ideal for preserving organic tissue. The Nile Delta in the north is a different story. Higher humidity, seasonal flooding, and waterlogged soil meant that mummies buried in Lower Egypt decomposed far more readily over the centuries. Entire populations of mummies in the delta region simply rotted away before anyone could find them.
Even in the dry south, preservation wasn’t guaranteed. Tombs that were breached by robbers let in air and moisture. Insects, bacteria, and fungi did slow but steady work on exposed remains. The mummies that survive today are the ones that benefited from both ideal conditions and the luck of staying sealed.
How Many Mummies Remain Undiscovered
Despite all of this destruction, Egypt almost certainly still holds a significant number of undiscovered mummies. Of the roughly 170 known rulers who reigned across 3,300 years of pharaonic history, about 20% of their tombs have never been located. That figure doesn’t include the countless nobles, priests, and ordinary citizens who were also mummified. Respected Egyptologists have estimated that between 40 and 60 undiscovered tombs may exist in the Valley of the Kings alone. John Romer, a specialist in the Valley, believes that several key rulers from the late 19th and early 20th Dynasties remain undisturbed with their grave goods somewhere in or near the Valley.
So Egyptian mummies are rare in museums and collections, but they may be less rare underground. The problem is that thousands of years of looting, commerce, entertainment, and environmental decay destroyed the ones that were accessible, while the ones that survived did so by staying hidden. The mummies we have represent a tiny fraction of what ancient Egypt produced, and the ones we’re still missing may tell us just as much about the forces that destroyed them as about the civilization that created them.