volume 2 - Robert Bedrosian's Armenian History Workshop

386 Mummy.
used by the Persians in embalming the dead. Originally
this substance must have been wax or contained wax
(Pers. milm ^y), but later the Persians gave the name
mUmiyd to the bitumen which flowed down the sides
of the famous " Mummy Mountain."^ The Arabs
adopted the word, and 'Abd al-Latif (ed. de Sacy, p. 201)
applied it to : (1) a medicament made of pitch, tar,
cedar oil and pine oil ; (2) the bitumen of Judea ; (3)
the bitumen found in tombs (called " al-kaburi " or
" tomb-bitumen " ; and (4) the bitumen of Yaman and
Southern Arabia. The Arabs called the dead body
which had been preserved with bitumen or picibitumen
" mumiyah," ^y, but our word " mummy " is
derived from the Persian miimiyy i.jfj-*,
i.e., that
which has been treated with wax, or resembles wax
(Dozy, Suppl. II, page 624), and not from mumiyi, the
name of the substance used in embalming the dead.
As long as mummification was practised in Egypt
the physician had no difficulty in obtainmg supplies of
bitumen or mi^mM from the merchants, who brought it
from Hit on the Euphrates, and the Dead Sea, and
no doubt, found the trade very profitable. But when
mummification ceased to be general the trade in bitumen
between Hit and the Dead Sea and Egypt declined,
and the physicians were driven to seek another source
of supply. This they found in the mummies which I have
already described, and for several centuries the bitumen
which was used as a drug in Egypt was obtained from
Ancient Egyptian tombs. At first only the masses of.
bitumen from the skulls and bodies of the dead were
used by the physician, but when these became scarce
the bitumenized flesh of the dead was pounded up and
became a common element in medicines. At length
this source of supply began to fail also, and then
unscrupulous persons in Alexandria obtained possession
of the bodies of criminals, and of those who had died of
* See Ouseley, Travels, ii, p. 171 &.