Egyptian mummies wouldn’t be so rare today if the Victorian British didn’t eat most of them.
So back in the time of the crusades Europeans found out about this amazing miracle remedy, bitumen, also known as asphalt. Due to some sort of error in translation maybe, they believed the mummification process used bitumen and started using mummies as an easy source of medicine. As mummies became more scarce bodies were actually being mummified, added bitumen, aged and shipped to Europe. The 19th century rolled up and things got more interesting. Mummy brown, a paint made with ground mummy powder was all the rave (in use up to the 1930s) and mummy unwrapping parties were the pastime of the rich and richer, a macabre spectacle, all in the name of science, of course.