The Strange and Unusual Podcast
Aug 31, 2026 · 41 min · 11 segments
For 300 years, Europeans ate human beings as medicine, with mummy powder, skull, the fat of the executed, and bought it over the counter from licensed apothecaries. During those same centuries, they…
Alison HorrocksHost
And the single most effective way to prove someone was a savage was the accusation that they ate other people.
It's a black, sticky, terry mineral pitch that seeps out of certain rock formations.
most famously from a mountain in the region of Darabgarh, in what is now Iran.
It's bitumen, natural asphalt, and it was, by the standards of pre-modern medicine, genuinely valuable.
And they smell of resin because of what was packed into them and what 3,000 years does to them.
to a physician who had handled mineral pitch and then handled one of these, the resemblance wasn't far-fetched at all.
Chemical analysis of Egyptian mummies has shown genuine bitumen in a number of them, particularly from the later periods.
The embalmers really did seem to have used it at times, so it's not entirely untrue, but it's a partial overlap that was greatly overblown.
The erroneous conclusion that was reached was that all these bodies were full of mumia, and we call them mummies today because of this misunderstanding.
The blame is usually placed on a man named Gerard of Cremona, an Italian medieval translator.
There's also an interesting account from around the year 1200 by the physician and traveler Abd al-Latif al-Budadi who wrote about being in Egypt and encountering the sale of material taken from ancient bodies.
used as a substitute for the mineral So the substitution is documented in Egypt By the 1500s Europe wanted mummies and Egypt had them This created a problem for merchants in Alexandria in the middle of the 16th century.
And the single most effective way to prove someone was a savage was the accusation that they ate other people.
It's a black, sticky, terry mineral pitch that seeps out of certain rock formations.
most famously from a mountain in the region of Darabgarh, in what is now Iran.
It's bitumen, natural asphalt, and it was, by the standards of pre-modern medicine, genuinely valuable.
And they smell of resin because of what was packed into them and what 3,000 years does to them.
to a physician who had handled mineral pitch and then handled one of these, the resemblance wasn't far-fetched at all.
Chemical analysis of Egyptian mummies has shown genuine bitumen in a number of them, particularly from the later periods.
The embalmers really did seem to have used it at times, so it's not entirely untrue, but it's a partial overlap that was greatly overblown.
The erroneous conclusion that was reached was that all these bodies were full of mumia, and we call them mummies today because of this misunderstanding.
The blame is usually placed on a man named Gerard of Cremona, an Italian medieval translator.
There's also an interesting account from around the year 1200 by the physician and traveler Abd al-Latif al-Budadi who wrote about being in Egypt and encountering the sale of material taken from ancient bodies.
used as a substitute for the mineral So the substitution is documented in Egypt By the 1500s Europe wanted mummies and Egypt had them This created a problem for merchants in Alexandria in the middle of the 16th century.
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