Persian mum, wax or bitumen, Arabic mumiya, was a prized medicine from the few places bitumen seeped from the earth. Arabs encountering Egypt's black-coated dead in the seventh century assumed the coating was mumiya. Gerard of Cremona, translating al-Razi in the twelfth century, defined mumiya as the substance found where bodies are buried with aloes, sealing the error into Latin. Abd el-Latif al-Baghdadi recommended corpse-mummy as a substitute when mineral bitumen ran short. By 1600, mummy named the body itself.
From the twelfth to the seventeenth century, ground Egyptian mummy was a mainstream European medicine for everything from bruises to epilepsy, and demand gutted the tombs. When authentic stock ran low, merchants manufactured fresh mummy from executed criminals and unclaimed corpses, drying them for the apothecaries. The pigment mummy brown, actual ground mummy, painted masterpieces into the nineteenth century. Paracelsus endorsed the drug; Ambroise Pare tried to ban it.
The claim: mummy demonstrates that a profitable mistranslation outperforms any correction, the philologists had the right answer by the 1500s and the market ignored them for two centuries because the wrong answer had margins; words follow supply chains, not dictionaries. Verdict: the timeline supports it, error named the product, the product funded the error, and the word outlived the trade that justified it. The tombs are empty. The word is full.
How many translation mistakes does it take to turn a pharaoh into a pill?