this post was submitted on 02 Feb 2026
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Ughhhhh to expand on this awful bit of history: 'mummia' was the term for some common kinds of dark powdered resinous medicines, which someone later discovered you could wring out of preserved human remains. The term "mummified" means treated in a way that produces mummia, and thence arose the term mummy. It's popularity as a medicine (words fail to describe my revulsion) led to the wide adoption of the term in popular culture to refer to someone who had been treated in such a way as a 'mummy', possibly due to a mistranslation (tho there's scant evidence of that being the specific cause - it seems more likely it was a misunderstanding that two similar substances were not the same substance, and that they were primarily familiar with dead-human mummia because of the crusades. There's... a lot of debate on the issue though)