In the 11th century, scientist and doctor Avicenna describes the treatment of some diseases with the help of mumijo. A person who translated his scientific works made a mistake and as a result, the translation said that mummies possessed healing properties. So in the 15th century, Egypt started selling embalmed corpses.

Europeans bought mummies, ground them into a powder and used this as medicine and as a brown dye. This didn’t go out of fashion until the beginning of the 20th century, when European mass media started busting myths about the curse of the pharaohs.