Mummy paper

Mummy paper is paper that is claimed to be made from the linen wrappings and other fibers (e.g. papyrus) from Egyptian mummies imported to the United States circa 1855. The existence of this paper has not been conclusively confirmed, but it has been widely discussed.

The history of mummy paper in America is intimately connected with the history of both American papermaking and papermaking in general.

Paper can be said to have been born in ancient Egypt, circa 3000 B.C., with the invention of what the Romans called "papyrus", based on an earlier Greek name for the material. Papyrus is not paper in the modern sense of the word, since it was formed from compressed sheets of reed stalks and not a pulp. Paper made from a pulped plant fiber can be credited to Ts'ai Lun of China in 105 A.D., when he first presented the Emperor with a sheet of paper made from the inner bark of a mulberry tree. When the technique of papermaking found its way into Europe, paper was made not from trees but from a pulp of cotton and linen rag fibers. This technique of papermaking first came to America in Germantown, Pennsylvania in 1690 when William Rittenhouse established the first paper mill. Rittenhouse had been a papermaker in Amsterdam, the Netherlands before coming to America, bringing European techniques with him.

By the 1850s, papermaking in America was reaching a crisis point. America was producing more newspapers than any other country and its paper consumption was equal to England and France's combined. According to one 1856 estimate, it would take 6,000 wagons, each carrying two tons of paper, to carry all the paper consumed by American newspapers in a single year. This equals out to a need for 405,000,000 pounds of rags for the 800 paper mills then at work in the United States. Most of these rags were imported from Europe, with the largest source being from Italy. By 1854, however, Italy also started exporting rags to England, decreasing the supply available to American paper-makers. This meant that a substitute for or a new supply source of rags needed to be found, and quickly.

At this same time period, Egyptian mummies were reasonably known to the public in America. Many mummies had been part of exhibits and had been shown in museums and traveling shows across the country. In fact, Dr. Pettigrew was the operator of one such show, where he would unwrap or unroll mummies in front of a crowd for their amusement. The impetus for a new supply source of rags for paper may have come from Dr. Isaiah Deck, an Englishman by birth, a New Yorker by residence, a geologist by trade, an archeologist by hobby and a determined explorer. On an earlier copper prospecting trip to Jamaica, Deck had evaluated other sources for paper including aloe, plantain, banana and dagger-grass, but none were acceptable. Thus, already preoccupied with paper and paper sources, Deck set out on a trip to Egypt in 1847 to search for Cleopatra's lost emerald mines. Deck's father, also named Isaiah, had known Giovanni Belzoni, a famous Italian explorer of Egyptian tombs; Deck the younger thus inherited from his father some Egyptian artifacts, including a piece of linen from a mummy.

While searching for the lost mines, Deck couldn't help but notice the plethora of mummies and mummy parts that turned up in communal burial sites called "mummy pits." He wrote, "So numerous are they in some localities out of the usual beaten tracks of most travelers, that after the periodical storms whole areas may be seen stripped of sand, and leaving fragments and limbs exposed in such plenty and variety." Deck did some calculations: assume two thousand years of widespread embalming, an average life span of thirty-three years, and a stable population of eight million. This would leave you with about five hundred million mummies. Add to that the number of mummified animals including cats, bulls and crocodiles, and the number drastically rises. Deck also states, "it is by no means rare to find above 30 lbs. weight of linen wrappings on mummies...A princess from the late Mr. Pettigrew's collection was swathed in 40 thicknesses, producing 42 yards of the finest texture." Deck further calculated that the average consumption of paper in America is about 15  lbs. per person per year. This meant that the supply of Egyptian mummies would be able to keep up with the American demand for about 14 years, by which point a substitute supply source or material would likely have been discovered, rendering the need for rags unnecessary.

Whether or not American paper mills took Isaiah Deck's proposal seriously cannot be either conclusively proved or rejected. However, some evidence does remain.

Dard Hunter is a well-known paper researcher and cataloguer and a proponent of handmade paper. His book, Papermaking: The History and Technique of an Ancient Craft, relates the experiments of I. Augustus Stanwood in both ground-wood paper and mummy paper. Hunter received his information from Stanwood's son Daniel, a professor of international law. According to Daniel, during the American Civil War his father was hard-pressed for materials for his Maine mill. As such, he imported mummies from Egypt, stripped the bodies of their wrappings, and used this material for making paper. Several shiploads of mummies were brought to the mill in Gardiner, Maine and were thus used to make a brown wrapping paper for grocers, butchers and other merchants. Professor Stanwood continues on to report that the rags supposedly caused a cholera outbreak among the workers since there were no standards for disinfection at this time. However, since cholera is actually a bacterium, it is unlikely that active disease cells could have survived for centuries in the wrappings, meaning the outbreak at the plant was likely either from poor personal hygiene of the workers or from dirty rags recently imported from deceased Europeans, primarily Frenchmen, and Italians, rather than the mummy rags.