By Dr. Marcus Hale 
Quick Summary
- A mummy is a body, human or animal, whose soft tissue survived long after death. Sometimes nature did it (dry sand, ice, peat). Sometimes people did, on purpose.
- The word comes from Persian mumiya, meaning bitumen, by way of Arabic and medieval Latin. The ancient Egyptians never used it.
- The oldest known deliberate mummies are Chilean, not Egyptian. The Chinchorro were preserving their dead by about 5050 BCE.
- Egypt’s earliest resin-treated burial wrappings date to roughly 4500-3350 BCE. Full embalming later took about 70 days, according to the Greek writer Herodotus.
- Egyptians mummified the dead because they believed the soul needed an intact body to return to.
- Real mummies never come alive. The walking mummy is Victorian fiction, later amplified by Hollywood.
- Modern CT scans have found a stab wound, clogged arteries and malaria inside mummies.
Type “mummy” into a search bar and two worlds collide. On one side, bandaged movie monsters lurching out of a sarcophagus. On the other, grainy photographs of real human remains that make you wince a little. Between them sits an actual human story, and it is weirdly hard to find.
I suspect you have felt this. One page says mummies were Egyptian. Another says Chile got there first. A third mutters about tar. The frustrating part? They are all partly right. The word covers a huge range of bodies, cultures and centuries, and almost nobody tells you where its edges are.
So here is the fix. Clean answer first, then the surprises. By the end you will have a clear answer to what is mummy in history: what a mummy is, where the word really comes from, who made the first one, why the Egyptians cared so much and what scientists are still pulling out of wrapped bodies today. If you want the backdrop before the bodies, my companion piece What was everyday life in ancient Egypt shows the living world these people came from.
1. What Is Mummy in History? The Short Answer
A mummy is a body whose skin, muscle or other soft tissue has survived far longer than it should have. That is the whole definition. No bandages required. No curse. Not even Egypt, strictly speaking.
What Exactly Is a Mummy?
Two routes lead to the same result. In the first, the environment does the work: scorching dry sand, freezing ice, acidic peat, salty desert air. In the second, people step in, removing organs, drying the tissue and sealing the whole mummy body with resins, oils and wrappings. Historians call these natural and artificial mummification.
| Natural mummy | Artificial mummy | |
|---|---|---|
| Who does the work? | The environment | People, using skill and ingredients |
| Typical conditions | Hot dry sand, ice, peat bog, salt desert | Organ removal, drying agents, resins, linen wrappings |
| Famous example | Gebelein Man; Ötzi the Iceman | Chinchorro mummies; Egyptian embalmed bodies |
| Intent | Accidental | Deliberate, usually ritual or social |
What Is Mummy in History in Egypt?
Egypt is where the idea reached its peak. Over some three thousand years, embalmers turned a rough practice into something close to an industry: standard steps, specialist workshops, imported ingredients, written spells. Evidence of deliberate organ removal there goes back to around 2600 BCE, to the burial equipment of Queen Hetepheres, mother of the pharaoh Khufu. After that the practice ran on through the pharaonic age and into Roman rule. Egyptian mummies are simply the best-documented chapter in a much bigger book.
Can a Real Mummy Come Alive?
No. Flatly no. A real mummy alive is a Hollywood idea, not a historical one. The walking mummy is a literary invention, and a surprisingly British one. Jane Loudon’s 1827 novel The Mummy! imagined a revived Egyptian in the twenty-second century. Arthur Conan Doyle’s 1892 story “Lot No. 249” put a murderous reanimated mummy in an Oxford college. Universal’s 1932 film starring Boris Karloff did the rest.
2. Where Did the Term “Mummy” Originate?
Not from Egypt. The ancient Egyptians never used the word, and that surprises almost everyone.
The trail starts in Persian. Mum meant wax, and mumiya meant bitumen, the black, tar-like substance that seeps from certain rocks. Arabic borrowed it as mūmiyā, which could mean either medicinal bitumen or a bitumen-embalmed body. Medieval Latin turned that into mumia, and English inherited it from there.
Why bitumen? Because unwrapped Egyptian bodies often looked black and glossy, and medieval writers assumed tar was the secret ingredient. The chemistry points elsewhere. Resins, fats and plant oils did most of the work, and bitumen turns up only in some later mummies. The name stuck anyway. Names do that.
What Is the Real Story of Mummy? The Medicine-Cabinet Years
This is the part I find hardest to read. Europeans came to believe that powdered mummy cured wounds, bruises and a long list of other complaints. Apothecaries sold it. For centuries, ancient Egyptians were ground up and swallowed. The mix-up began with Persian bitumen medicine: translators confused mumia the remedy with the bodies themselves, and a trade was born.
The Victorians brought a different appetite. In the 1830s the London surgeon Thomas Pettigrew unrolled mummies in front of invited audiences, then published A History of Egyptian Mummies in 1834. Paint-makers sold a pigment called mummy brown. I would call all of it a grim irony. Egyptian embalmers spent seventy days honouring a single body. We spent centuries stirring thousands of them into medicine and paint.
3. Who Was the First Mummy Ever?
Here is the honest answer, and it is less tidy than a headline: nobody knows, because “first” depends on what you count. Three answers compete.
The first deliberate mummies: Chile. The Chinchorro people of the Atacama coast were preserving their dead about 7,000 years ago, around 5050 BCE, which puts them thousands of years ahead of Egypt. UNESCO inscribed their settlements and mummification tradition as a World Heritage property in 2021. Archaeologists have recovered hundreds of bodies, including children and infants. By the accounts reported in the Smithsonian, nobody was left out, whatever their family or wealth. Some bodies were rebuilt and painted black or red with manganese and iron-based pigments, closer to sculpture than burial.
The first Egyptian bodies preserved by nature. Gebelein Man lay in a shallow sand grave around 3500 BCE and came out of it with skin, hair and organs intact. He has been in the British Museum since 1901. A CT scan in 2012 showed a wound beside his left shoulder blade, probably made by a copper blade, and no defensive injuries. Put plainly, he was likely stabbed in the back by someone he did not see coming. He was between 18 and 21.
The first Egyptian artificial treatment. In 2014, a team led by Jana Jones examined linen wrappings from the Mostagedda cemeteries in Upper Egypt and found resin-based embalming recipes in burials dated to roughly 4500-3350 BCE. Pine resin, plant extracts, gums and fats appeared in proportions close to those used some three thousand years later. The pine resin may have come from as far away as southeastern Anatolia. So the recipe was old, and it was already travelling.
Five “firsts” in mummy history. Culture Mosaic original chart, built from the sources listed at the end.
So who was the first mummy ever? Probably a nameless person on the Chilean coast, or in a sand pit beside the Nile, thousands of years before anyone wrote the word. I find that more moving than a pharaoh’s name would be. If you are curious how old the typical Egyptian example is, I tackled that question in How Old Are Most Egyptian Mummies?
4. Why Did Ancient Egyptians Preserve Their Dead?
Egyptian Death and Afterlife Mummies: A Soul That Needs a Home
Egyptians did not picture a person as one thing. They saw a bundle: body, name, shadow, heart and several spiritual parts. The ka was a life force. The ba, drawn as a human-headed bird, was something like personality. After death the ba was thought to travel and return to the body, and the ka needed offerings. When everything worked, they joined as the akh, a transfigured spirit. No body, no reunion. That is the logic behind the whole trade.
The heart got special treatment. Embalmers left it in the chest, because Egyptians placed intelligence and moral memory there. In the judgement scene of the Book of the Dead, the heart is weighed against the feather of Maat, the principle of truth and order. The famous Papyrus of Ani in the British Museum shows exactly that scene.
Then there is Osiris. In the myth, the god is murdered, his body is pieced together and wrapped, and he is restored to a kind of life as ruler of the dead. Mummification re-enacted that rescue. Dead Egyptians were even called “an Osiris.” I think this is the deepest answer to why: the embalmers were not only stopping decay. They were copying a god’s resurrection. The final ritual that switched the senses back on, the Opening of the Mouth, and the curse myths that grew around royal tombs get their own treatment in Secrets of the Mummy’s Tomb.
Not everyone could afford it. Herodotus, writing around 450 BCE, described three price levels, with the full seventy-day treatment reserved for those who could pay. Plenty of ordinary Egyptians were simply buried in desert pits where the sand preserved them for free. To see where those early graves lay, read Where Were Ancient Egyptian Mummies First Buried? and for the wider rituals around them, Ancient Egyptian burial customs.
5. How Did Mummification Actually Work?
Picture a workshop, not a temple. That is closer to the truth. Herodotus gives seventy days for the full process, and scholars usually read that as about forty days of drying in natron, a natural salt, with the rest given to anointing, wrapping and ritual.
| Step | What happened | Why it mattered |
|---|---|---|
| 1. Cleansing | The body was washed in a ritual purification. | Purity came before any cutting. |
| 2. Brain removal | Removed through the nose with a hook, the method Herodotus describes. | The brain was little valued and rots fast. |
| 3. Organ removal | An incision in the left flank; lungs, liver, stomach and intestines taken out. The heart stayed. | Organs spoil first; the heart was needed for judgement. |
| 4. Drying | The body was packed in natron for about forty days. | Draws out water and stops bacteria. |
| 5. Anointing and padding | Resins and oils applied; linen padding restored the shape. | Antibacterial and lifelike, with a pleasant smell. |
| 6. Wrapping | Many layers of linen, with amulets set between them. | Magical protection for the journey. |
| 7. Ritual | Funeral procession and the Opening of the Mouth. | Restored the senses for the afterlife. |
The removed organs were not thrown away. They were dried, wrapped and stored in canopic jars guarded by the four sons of Horus: Imsety, Hapy, Duamutef and Qebehsenuef. Details shifted across three thousand years, so treat the table as a typical pattern, not a rulebook.
What Was Used to Mummify a Body? The Saqqara Recipes
For a long time scholars guessed at the ingredients from ancient texts. Then, in 2023, a team led by Maxime Rageot analysed residues from 31 vessels found in an embalming workshop at Saqqara, dated to the 26th Dynasty (664-525 BCE), and published the results in Nature. Many vessels were labelled in ink, and one inscription describes a mixture meant to make the odour pleasant. That single line tells you smell mattered to the people doing this work.
The findings rewrote part of the recipe book. A substance the Egyptians called antiu, long translated as myrrh or incense, turned out to be a mixture of cedar, cypress or juniper oils with animal fat. Pistachio resin and castor oil appeared only in mixtures meant for the head. Other ingredients, including elemi and dammar resins, came from tropical Africa and Southeast Asia. Embalmers were plugged into trade routes that crossed continents. For the chemistry in more depth, my breakdown in Ancient Egyptian Mummies Preservation Techniques goes step by step.
6. Which Other Cultures Made Mummies?
If your mental picture of a mummy is Egyptian, you are missing most of the planet. So what is mummy in history beyond the Nile? The table below compares six traditions, some made by people and some by luck.
| Mummy tradition | Where and when | Type | Why it stands out |
|---|---|---|---|
| Chinchorro | Atacama coast, Chile; from about 5050 BCE | Deliberate | Oldest known deliberate mummification; bodies rebuilt and painted. UNESCO site since 2021. |
| Egyptian | Nile Valley; roughly 4500 BCE into the Roman period | Both | Most elaborate and best documented, with workshops, written spells and imported ingredients. |
| Tarim Basin | Xinjiang, China; from about 1800 BCE | Natural | A dry, salty desert preserved hair, wool clothing and felt hats. |
| Ötzi the Iceman | Alps on the Italy-Austria border; about 3300 BCE | Natural | Found in 1991 in ice; tattoos and stomach contents survived. Displayed in Bolzano. |
| Lindow Man | Lindow Moss, Cheshire, England; around the first century BCE-CE | Natural | Peat bog body found in 1984 and now held by the British Museum. |
| Inca mummy bundles | Andes; 15th-16th centuries CE | Both | Ancestors were kept, honoured and brought out for ceremonies, not hidden away. |
Britain has its own entry, which many readers never expect. Lindow Man was pulled from a Cheshire peat bog, where acid tanned the skin rather than dried it. Different chemistry, same result. People, centuries apart and oceans apart, kept arriving at the same stubborn idea: a body is worth saving.
7. What Do Mummies Still Reveal Today?
So what is mummy in history worth to researchers today? Evidence. This is where mummies stop being relics. CT scanning lets researchers look inside without unwrapping, and the results keep overturning old stories. Gebelein Man’s stab wound is one. He has been seen by millions of museum visitors, and only in 2012 did anyone learn how he died.
Royal mummies have been just as revealing. A 2010 study in JAMA led by Zahi Hawass combined CT scans and DNA testing on Tutankhamun’s family and found genetic evidence of malaria and signs of a bone disorder, which helped push the old murdered-king theory aside. The full argument is in How Did King Tut Die and Why.
Then there is the heart. The Horus study, published in The Lancet in 2013, CT-scanned 137 mummies from four ancient populations and found probable or definite hardening of the arteries in roughly a third of them. I would argue that finding ought to humble us. Heart disease is not only the price of modern lunches.
Even animals have secrets. CT scans of wrapped animal bundles showed that some contained no animal at all, a surprise I covered in Ancient Egyptian animal mummies.
Where Can You See Real Mummy Pictures, and Real Mummies?
A caution first: these were people. Responsible museums publish every picture of a mummy with care, and in England, Wales and Northern Ireland the Human Tissue Act 2004 sets rules for holding human remains. For respectful, well-captioned images, start with the British Museum’s online collection, then visit its Early Egypt gallery in London to meet Gebelein Man. Manchester Museum has a significant Egyptian collection, and the Ulster Museum in Belfast displays Takabuti, an Egyptian woman’s mummy brought to Belfast in the 1830s.
Now the odd one out. If you ever find yourself in northern Chile, the university museum in the Azapa Valley near Arica holds Chinchorro material, bodies once rebuilt and painted like sculptures. It is not on the standard itinerary. It should be.
What Is Mummy in History for Kids? A 60-Second Version
A mummy is a body that did not rot away. Sometimes the desert dried it. Sometimes people did it on purpose. Ancient Egyptians believed the dead needed their bodies in the afterlife, so they took out the parts that spoil fastest, dried the body with a special salt called natron, rubbed it with oils and wrapped it in linen. The whole job took about 70 days. Mummies are not monsters, and they do not walk around. They are people from long ago, and scientists use scans to learn how they lived.
If you asked me to answer what is mummy in history in one line, I would say this: a mummy is a decision. Someone, somewhere, looked at a person they had lost and refused to let the body vanish. Chile, Egypt, a bog in Cheshire: different hands, same stubborn grief. If you are in London, go and stand in front of Gebelein Man for a minute. Then come back and read the rest.
More history features live on Culture mosaic.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is mummy in history, in simple terms?
In history, a mummy is a human or animal body whose soft tissue survived long after death. Preservation can be natural, through dry sand, ice or peat, or artificial, through organ removal, drying agents, resins and wrapping. Egyptian mummies are the best known, but the Chinchorro of Chile were deliberately preserving their dead by about 5050 BCE, thousands of years earlier.
Where did the word mummy come from?
The word traces back to Persian mumiya, meaning bitumen, which Arabic borrowed as mumiya and medieval Latin turned into mumia. Medieval writers assumed black, tar-like bitumen was the main Egyptian embalming material, so the word moved from the substance to the bodies. The ancient Egyptians never used it themselves.
Who was the first mummy ever?
No single named person holds the title. The oldest known deliberate mummies belong to the Chinchorro culture of northern Chile, from about 5050 BCE. In Egypt, naturally preserved bodies such as Gebelein Man date to about 3500 BCE, and resin-treated burial wrappings from Mostagedda date to roughly 4500-3350 BCE.
Is there such a thing as a real mummy alive?
No. A real mummy is a dead body and cannot come alive. The reanimated mummy comes from fiction, including Jane Loudon’s 1827 novel The Mummy!, Arthur Conan Doyle’s 1892 story Lot No. 249 and Universal’s 1932 film. Historians and archaeologists treat mummies as human remains that deserve respect.
Why did the ancient Egyptians mummify their dead?
Egyptians believed a person’s spiritual parts, including the ka and ba, needed an intact body to reunite in the afterlife. Mummification also echoed the myth of Osiris, whose body was restored and wrapped. The full process took about 70 days according to Herodotus, though many poorer Egyptians were buried in desert sand without it.
Sources
UNESCO World Heritage Centre / ICOMOS, evaluation of “Settlement and Artificial Mummification of the Chinchorro Culture in the Arica and Parinacota Region” (inscribed 2021). https://whc.unesco.org/document/189320
Smithsonian Magazine, “Can the World’s Oldest Mummies Survive Climate Change and Other Threats in the Coming Decades?” https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/can-the-worlds-oldest-mummies-survive-climate-cange-other-threats-coming-decades-180980146/
Jones, J., Higham, T. F. G., Oldfield, R., O’Connor, T. P. and Buckley, S. A. (2014), “Evidence for prehistoric origins of Egyptian mummification in Late Neolithic burials,” PLOS ONE 9(8): e103608. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0103608
Rageot, M. et al. (2023), “Biomolecular analyses enable new insights into ancient Egyptian embalming,” Nature 614, 287-293. https://archiv.ub.uni-heidelberg.de/propylaeumdok/5756/1/Rageot%20et%20al%2C%20Biomolecular%20analyses%20Egyptian%20embalming_1_2023.pdf
British Museum, Gebelein Man (EA 32751), Early Egypt gallery and collection database. https://www.britishmuseum.org/collection
Channel 4 News, “Museum sleuths unearth murdered mummy’s secret,” 16 November 2012. https://www.channel4.com/news/british-museum-ginger-egyptian-murdered-mummy
Hawass, Z. et al. (2010), “Ancestry and Pathology in King Tutankhamun’s Family,” JAMA 303(7): 638-647. https://doi.org/10.1001/jama.2010.121
Thompson, R. C. et al. (2013), “Atherosclerosis across 4000 years of human history: the Horus study of four ancient populations,” The Lancet 381(9873): 1211-1222.
Herodotus, Histories, Book 2, chapters 86-88 (on Egyptian embalming). Perseus Digital Library, Tufts University. https://www.perseus.tufts.edu/
British Museum, Papyrus of Ani (EA 10470) and Lindow Man collection records. https://www.britishmuseum.org/collection
Pettigrew, T. J. (1834), A History of Egyptian Mummies, London. Loudon, J. C. (1827), The Mummy! A Tale of the Twenty-Second Century. Doyle, A. C. (1892), “Lot No. 249,” Harper’s Magazine.
Journal of Biological Research (PAGEPress), article on mummies, mummification and bitumen (etymology and medicinal use of mumia). https://pagepressjournals.org/jbr/article/download/10213/9672/55232
Mummia (history of medicine and the word’s etymology), secondary reference. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mummia
South Tyrol Museum of Archaeology, Ötzi the Iceman. https://www.iceman.it/en/
Encyclopaedia Britannica, “mummy” (Tarim Basin, Inca and other non-Egyptian traditions). https://www.britannica.com/topic/mummy-mortuary-practice
Human Tissue Act 2004, legislation.gov.uk. https://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/2004/30/contents