Egypt Antiquities Trafficking

Mummy Smugglers Reveal Vast Antiquities Black Market

The rescue of an ancient Egyptian mummy's sarcophagus this month from alleged smugglers in New York — the first time authorities say an international artifacts' smuggling ring was dismantled within the United States — sounds more like the plot of a movie than reality.

Amazingly, however, mummy smuggling not only still happens today, it was once so common that enough mummies were available to be ground up and sold as powder, archaeologists reveal.

"Mummy powder was something you could buy in pharmacies up to 1920, because people thought it was a type of medication," said Egyptologist Regine Schulz, curator of ancient art at the Walters Art Museum in Baltimore.

Today's black market for mummy and other antiquities is in the billions of dollars, though exact numbers aren't known. Besides not having a clear bead on the breadth of trafficking in Egyptian artifacts , scientists and officials say it's often difficult to protect the precious artifacts as the Egyptian desert is so vast. [ Science as Art: A Gallery ]

A long history of mummy dealings

The trafficking of mummies traces back to medieval times.

"When Christianity and Islam were rising, mummification was not really the main habit anymore, although we have some mummies of Christian bishops in Egypt that do date back to the seventh and eighth centuries A.D.," Schulz said. "So from the Middle Ages on, mummies were a bit curious and strange."

Nevertheless, so many mummies were made during ancient Egypt times that enough were available to make mummy powder, or mummia, whose pigment "one assumes was a dark brown," said Gary Vikan, director of the Walters Art Museum.

"Mummification was not just something for pharaohs or the upper class — it was the normal thing in ancient Egypt for hundreds of years," Schulz said. "My aunt lived for many years in Egypt in the 1950s and 1960s, and sandstorms would often reveal tiny remains of mummies — sometimes a little wrapping, sometimes a little bone." [ Top 10 Weird Ways We Deal With the Dead ]

Given the way mummification helped preserve the body, people thought mummies had something to do with eternity, and, in turn that mummy powder could be used as medication, Schulz said.

As strange as grinding up ancient corpses for sale might be in modern times, "mummies were seen as objects back then, not people," Schulz said. "There was nothing illegal about it .