What happened to Egyptian mummies when they were found?
go back to a few hundred years to the middle ages and believe it or not they used to powder the mummies and sell them as medicine, but I think they would have killed more people than cured them. Some were sold as curios in the georgian and victorian times and unwrapped by rich men posing as scientists, This inevitably destroyed the mummy. Some were crushed and used as paint pigment, Mark Twain joked that some were sold as fuel. Many were sent abroad in particular animal mummies as fertilizer. Many ended up in museums all around the world where due to poor preservation they slowly crumbled away and a few have been preserved and kept.
In the early days of Egyptology many mummies and other fragile artifacts were badly damaged by their finders and others.This was mainly due to ignorance of the effects of handling exposure etc. During the 1930 there were literally truck loads of artifacts arriving at the Cairo Museum every day and some have yet to be properly assessed and cataloged remaining in the museum’s vast basements. There was a tale (and I think it may be just that …a tale) that mummies were being exported to the United States early in the 1930s to use as fuel for steam trains!! Being very brittle and dessicated they would not be a feasible means of fuel Thankfully since that time much has been learned and these days the main focus is on conservation and preservation of all artifacts including the mummified remains of people,animals, birds and even crocodiles. There are many web sites that deal with the topic in detail.
