Mumia

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Pharmacy jar from the 18th century with the inscription "MUMIA"

Mumia (also Pulvis mumiae , Mumiya , mummy powder ) is a substance that was used as a medicine until the 1920s . It consisted of crushed Egyptian mummies . The substance was also sold under the name Mumia vera aegyptiaca and was also sold by well-known pharmaceutical companies. It was also used as a beautifully colored brown pigment (mummy brown) . The use of mumia is no longer accepted today for ethical reasons. Mumia must not be confused with Mumijo , a traditional natural product containing asphalt, which is used as a medicinal and tonic in Central Asian folk medicine.

history

Mummies have always been removed from their storage places through grave robberies in Egypt and neighboring regions. In addition to the 'royal graves', i.e. the graves of high-ranking people with rich grave goods , huge amounts of simple burials were also found. There were also numerous mummies of animals sacred to the Egyptians, such as falcons and cats.

It is not known since when these were used as a substance. Mumia is said to have been used for the first time two thousand years ago. It is now believed that it was imported into Europe from the 12th century. Initially, Mumia was just the Arabic name for pitch ( asphalt and bitumen ), derived from the Persian - Arabic mûm or môm for wax, which has been used as a valuable remedy since ancient times. Due to the similarity of the resinous embalming products found in ancient Egyptian mummies with these earth pitches, their name mumia or mummy was transferred to the mummified body. Initially, only the resin-like embalming products were extracted from the mummies as medicinal products. With the transfer of the name Mumia to the mummified bodies, the idea of ​​the healing effect of the pitch or the preservation products found in the mummies was probably also transferred to the preserved bodies themselves. In the 16th century the Arabs banned the mummy trade with Europe. They wanted to prevent Europeans from eating their ancestors - at that time almost every pharmacy in Europe had its mummy. Many mummy dealers used it to bury the hanged and the newly deceased in the desert sand and turned them into "ancient mummies".

Egyptian mummy dealer (1875, Félix Bonfils )

The beginning archeology of the 18th and 19th centuries brought buried ancient Egyptians back to the surface and supplied the market with their remains. Mumia vera came on the market in the form of a light, chocolate-colored powder, priced per pound or kilogram, or whole heads by piece. In 1924 Mumia vera aegyptiaca was sold for 12  gold marks per kilogram by the Merck company in Darmstadt. At this time, Mumia was increasingly ostracized in Europe. The art scholar Kurt Wehlte secured material from Moeves ' artist paint factory in Berlin to keep it as a historical document in his material archive (today the Dresden Academy of Fine Arts ) - the remaining stocks were simply "ingloriously" burned at the time. He expressly mentions that it was real corpse parts ("You can recognize clearly thick arteries and tubular bones" and "only half-decayed bandages"), but distances himself from the "irreverent desire for profit" to process and use them. Samples of historical medical mumia can also be found in the Frankfurt Senckenberg Natural History Museum .

In addition, all kinds of counterfeits for Mumia vera were widespread. Many of these "mummies" were probably of local origin. For example, J. van Beverwijck wrote as early as 1656: “But here the right balsam (cedar resin) is very rarely brought from Egypt, because most of the meat and bones come from poor people whose corpses are only embalmed with asphalt because of the lower costs or Judenleim… ”In 1645 his compatriot Petrus Baerdt said:“… they still call the same Mumia, whether it would be something special, although it may have been an arm or leg of a rotten or hung Lazarus or another pocky brothel goat. ”Im Great Turkish war were z. During the siege of Ofen, for example, so-called “infidels” who fell into the hands of the imperial troops or their allies, massacred, skinned and sacks of their dried bodies sent home to be processed as mumia. Numerous bog bodies also found their way into pharmacies, such as the bog body from Kibbelgaarn discovered in 1791 or the skeleton of the bog body from Obenaltendorf from Lower Saxony discovered in 1895 .

Mummy research is viewed very critically by Arab and African archaeologists today, and it is unclear how and to what extent the religious ideas of the ancient Egyptians, which led to the mummy cult, should be assessed and taken into account, but the use of the body parts can be seen as desecration consumption is a form of cannibalism .

Medicine and sorcery

Wooden pharmacy box with the inscription "MUMIÆ"

The alleged healing effect was attributed to the tar used in mummification . This tar was called mumiya and was said to have magical and healing powers. Attempts were made to obtain the rare mumiya from mummies. It should help against almost any illness and has been touted as an aphrodisiac . You swallowed it, rubbed it on the skin, or put it directly on the wound. To what extent tar was used in mummification at all is questionable today. Bitumen has recently been clearly proven . But other organic substances such as gums and resins may have taken on tar-like forms.

In 1574, the Frankfurt doctor Joachim Strüppe gave a treatise on the use of Mumia 21 areas of application and diseases, including cough, sore throat, dizziness, gout fragility, heartache, tremors, kidney addiction and headaches. The economic encyclopedia by Johann Georg Krünitz in the 18th century wrote about the use of alleged or real Egyptian mummies as remedies : “It is praised for dividing the congealed blood and the tumor, and it is not supposed to be because of its bituminous and balsamic parts, but also by virtue of the volatile salt. […] The tincture that is made of it has the balsamic properties of the mummy; they are given from 12 to 24 drops. When shopping, the druggists and pharmacists have to make sure that they get large pieces of meat that are not bare bones and that, if you throw some of them on coals, smell strong, but not like bad luck. The more beautiful and balsamic the smell, the higher the value of the goods. ”In Russia , the use of Mumia was propagated by the writer Leo Tolstoy as a“ growth-promoting remedy ”.

In traditional Chinese medicine, one from is mummified in honey drug prepared corpses as a treatment for bone fractures described. However, it is unclear whether such a drug was ever manufactured. In historical European medicine, other human medicinal substances such as human fat ( axungia hominis ) or cranium humanum (human skull) were in use for many centuries.

Paracelsus

In the 17th century, in the magical - medical tradition of Paracelsus , mummy is also understood to be an “extremely fine, subtle spiritual part that is innate in every human being”, which is present in their body parts (blood, tissue and excretions) and even for a while remains beyond death. By means of this “mummy”, “transplantation” (transfer to other living beings) in the sense of “ animal magnetism ” should be able to do miracles, so-called “ magnetic cures ”, for example in a weapon ointment .

painting

Mummy , also known as mummy brown, is an “impressively beautiful” deep brown pigment . It can be found as an artist's color from the middle of the 16th century. It was particularly valued in oil painting , where it was used to a particular extent in the "old masters" technique of underpainting brown, which was widely used at the time, in which it could be used from glazing to covering. It was also popular for shading .

Towards the end of the 19th century, extraction with ammonia, organic solvents or essential oils was also used to obtain a substance that is referred to in the literature as mumiin .

literature

  • The Egyptian mummy: a phenomenon of cultural history: the Egyptian mummies and mummification as a specific phenomenon of ancient Egyptian culture and their reception as a phenomenon of European culture: a case study on the image of ancient Egypt; Contribution to a workshop at the seminar for Sudanese archeology and Egyptology at the Humboldt University in Berlin <25. and April 26, 1998> . In: Martin Fitzenreiter, Christian E. Loeben (Hrsg.): Internet contributions to Egyptology and Sudan archeology (IBAES) . tape 1 . Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin - Seminar for Sudan Archeology and Egyptology, Berlin 1998 ( full text as PDF file [accessed on September 21, 2016]).
  • Benno R. Meyer-Hicken: About the origin of the substances called mumia and their use as remedies. Dissertation Department of Medicine, University of Kiel 1978.
  • Entry mummy. In: Kurt Wehlte: Materials and techniques of painting . 4th edition. Maier, Ravensburg 1990, ISBN 3-473-48359-1 , Chapter 1.48: Lexical directory of pigments. Section 4: Brown Pigments , p. 133 .

Web links

Commons : Mumia  - collection of images

Individual evidence

  1. ^ From the holdings of the German Pharmacy Museum in Heidelberg
  2. ↑ a b c d e Catarina I. Bothe: “The biggest garbage of all colors?” About asphalt and its use in painting. von Zabern, Mainz 2000 (1999), ISBN 978-3-8053-2585-1 ; Quoted from Kremer Pigmente: Mumie ( Memento of the original from January 12, 2005 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.kremer-pigmente.com archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. . On: kremer-pigmente.com ; last accessed on July 17, 2014.
  3. ↑ Elfriede Grabner: "Human fat" and "Mummy" as medicinal drugs . In: Austrian Medical Chamber (Ed.): Austrian Medical Journal . October 11, 1982, ISSN  0029-8786 , p. 1006 .
  4. ↑ a b c Beatrix Geßler-Löhr: Mumia vera aegyptiaca in the Occident. In: Path to Immortality. Mummies and mummification in ancient Egypt. Naturmuseum Senckenberg, exhibition vol. 4, no. 8 (loose-leaf folder), Senckenbergische Naturforschende Gesellschaft, Frankfurt a. M. 1995
  5. ↑ a b c d Quotation literally in K. Wehlte: Materials and techniques of painting. Ravensburg 1990.
  6. ↑ M. Fitzenreiter, CE Loeben (ed.): The Egyptian mummy: a phenomenon of cultural history. Berlin 1998, Chapter III: Reception and Environment , pp. 109f., Article reproduced slightly differently ( PDF file , accessed on June 17, 2014).
  7. ↑ Ludwig Hüttl: Max Emanuel. The Blue Elector, 1679–1726 . A political biography. 3. Edition. Süddeutscher Verlag, Munich 1976, ISBN 3-7991-5863-4 , p. 153 .
  8. ↑ Fitzenreiter: Death and Taboo - The Dead and the Corpse in the Cultural Context of Ancient Egypt and Europe . In: Fitzenreiter, Loeben (ed.): The Egyptian mummy . 1998, Chapter I: Introduction , p. 9-18 .
  9. ^ From the holdings of the Museum of Hamburg History , Hamburg
  10. ↑ Entry Mummy That. In: JG Krünitz (Ed.): Economic Encyclopedia . tape 96 : Mummy to Mummer . Pauli, Berlin, p. 662 ( kruenitz1.uni-trier.de [accessed on September 21, 2016] edition time of the encyclopedia 1773-1858).
  11. ^ Mary Roach : Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers . Paw Prints, 2008, ISBN 9781435287426 (Retrieved October 9, 2010).
  12. ↑ Mummy, an extremely fine, subtle spiritual part that pierces every human being. In: Johann Heinrich Zedler : Large complete universal lexicon of all sciences and arts . Volume 22, Leipzig 1739, column 745.