Mummies are called mummies because of a case of mistaken identity involving a black, tar-like substance. When Arab traders first encountered preserved Egyptian bodies, the dark coating on the corpses reminded them of a natural mineral pitch they knew as “mūmiyā.” They assumed the Egyptians had used this same substance to preserve the dead, and the name stuck to the bodies themselves. Over centuries, that word traveled through Latin and into English, where it became “mummy.”
The Original Meaning of Mūmiyā
Long before anyone used the word to describe a preserved corpse, mūmiyā referred to a specific substance: a naturally occurring black pitch, similar to asphalt, found seeping from rock caves in Persia. The word traces back to the Persian “mum,” meaning wax. This pitch was considered a precious medicine throughout the Middle East and was especially prized for healing broken bones. Physicians also recommended it for coughing up blood, headaches, epilepsy, sore throats, and even scorpion stings.
Ancient Greek and Roman writers knew about this substance too. Dioscorides, a Greek physician in the first century AD, described asphalt-like minerals as having properties that reduced inflammation, softened tissue, and helped bind wounds. Pliny the Elder listed additional uses for skin conditions and fevers. For centuries, this natural mineral pitch was a legitimate, well-documented medicine with no connection to dead bodies whatsoever.
How a Substance Became a Body
The critical shift happened when Arabic-speaking people encountered ancient Egyptian mummies. The embalming materials coating these bodies had turned extremely dark over hundreds or thousands of years, producing a hard, black, resinous surface. To observers, this looked almost identical to the Persian pitch they called mūmiyā. The assumption was straightforward: the Egyptians must have coated their dead in the same mineral.
That assumption was mostly wrong. Modern chemical analysis, using gas chromatography to identify molecular signatures in mummy coatings, has shown that bitumen (the technical term for natural asphalt) was not even detectable in Egyptian embalming materials before roughly 1000 BC. For the first 2,000 years of mummification practice, embalmers used tree resins and plant oils rather than petroleum-based pitch. When those resins were heated and aged, they naturally darkened into the same black color that looked so much like bitumen. Some extremely black mummies, including one from the Roman era and another from around 1000 BC, tested completely negative for bitumen despite their appearance.
Bitumen did eventually enter the Egyptian embalmer’s toolkit, but only as a later addition, and it was never the sole ingredient in any balm that has been analyzed. The black color that sparked the whole naming confusion turns out to be an unreliable indicator of what is actually in the coating.
From Arabic to Latin to English
The word’s journey into European languages followed a well-worn path: the translation of Arabic medical texts into Latin during the Middle Ages. When medieval European scholars translated Arabic works on medicine, they transliterated mūmiyā into the Latin “mumia.” But by this point, the word already carried a double meaning in Arabic. It could refer to the original Persian pitch or to the dark material scraped from Egyptian corpses. Latin inherited both meanings, and European physicians began using them interchangeably.
The earliest known use of “mummy” in English dates to before 1400, appearing in a surgical text by Lanfranc. At that time, the word still primarily referred to a medicinal substance rather than a preserved body. The meaning continued to evolve over the following centuries, gradually shifting until the preserved corpse itself became the primary definition.
Mummy as Medicine in Europe
This linguistic confusion had a bizarre and gruesome consequence. If mūmiyā was a healing substance, and mūmiyā came from mummies, then mummies themselves must be medicine. That was the logic European apothecaries followed from roughly the 12th through the 17th centuries, with the practice lingering into the 1700s.
Pharmacies across Europe stocked ground-up mummy as a drug. Supplies initially came from genuine Egyptian mummies, but demand eventually outstripped what tomb raiders could provide. Merchants began manufacturing substitutes from recently dead bodies, treating them with various preparations to mimic the aged, dark appearance of authentic mummy material. Desiccated bodies from North Africa and Guanche mummies from the Canary Islands were also exported to Europe and sold to apothecaries as the real thing.
An 18th-century pharmaceutical reference made the distinction explicit, describing two types of product: “Arabian mummy,” a dark liquid that had seeped from embalmed corpses treated with aloe, myrrh, and balsam, and “Egyptian mummy,” which was the liquified residue of bodies specifically prepared with pitch-asphalt. Both were sold as medicine. Both owed their names to a Persian word for rock tar.
Why the Name Outlasted the Confusion
By the time scientists understood that Egyptian embalming materials were mostly plant-based resins rather than petroleum pitch, the word “mummy” had been in common use for centuries. It had long since stopped needing any connection to its original meaning. The substance was forgotten, and the word belonged entirely to the preserved bodies. Today, “mummy” applies to any naturally or artificially preserved human remains, from Andean ice mummies to European bog bodies, none of which have anything to do with Persian mineral pitch. The name is a fossil of medieval misunderstanding, permanently embedded in the language.