Mummy Mania

For three hundred years, Europe could not stop consuming the Egyptian dead. They ate them, painted with them, and sold them by the ton.

In a London lecture theatre in the 1830s, a fashionable crowd in evening dress pressed in to watch a surgeon unwrap a three-thousand-year-old Egyptian body in front of them. Tickets were hard to get. It was entertainment. And it was only the most respectable use Europe had found for the mummies it had already been grinding into medicine, crushing into paint, and shipping home in bulk for centuries.

Mummy Mania: How Europe Ate the Egyptian Dead, Painted With Them, and Sold Them by the Ton tells the strange and unsettling story of the West's long obsession with Egypt's dead.

From the apothecary shops of sixteenth-century Paris to a bone auction in Liverpool in 1890, this narrative history brings the mania to life through the people who fed it. Behind the museum glass were quack druggists, a strongman turned tomb-robber, a surgeon who unrolled bodies for twenty years, and colormen who sold a brown paint made from human flesh.

Inside, you'll discover:

• How ground-up mummy became one of Europe's most trusted medicines • Why serious artists painted with a pigment made from the dead • Who Thomas Pettigrew was, and why crowds paid to watch him unwrap bodies • How a Paduan strongman became the most famous excavator in Egypt • What "mummy brown" really was, and when painters found out • Why the dead were shipped abroad as fuel, fertilizer, and paper stock • How a single retold story can outlive every fact beneath it • What the surviving records prove, and where the legends collapse • Why the mania finally ended, and what it says about us

This was not simply a historical curiosity. It was a case study in how greed, science, and fashion can turn other people's ancestors into a commodity.

The mummy mania produced real medicine, real art, and real scholarship. It also treated the human dead as raw material for profit.

Step into the apothecaries, lecture halls, and auction rooms where Egypt's dead were bought and sold, and meet the surgeons, showmen, and merchants who built an obsession that lasted three hundred years.