Yeah, I can't give the King's men much credit here. They destroyed a lot of scrolls, and it was only because they weren't getting much of anything that they stopped and abandoned excavations or focused on digging out sculptures they could show off (many now in the Getty Museum - great museum, but I did feel a bit melancholy thinking about the scrolls while I was there in 2019).

On the other hand, we ground up mummies for paint to the point that we ran out and used fresher corpses to meet demand.

It is a bit of miracle that they were preserved, and not just discarded.

Worse than that, lots were ground up (and consumed) for medicines.

In one of the Futurama episodes, Fry eats one of Farnsworth's mini mummies and Farnsworth is upset because he wanted to eat it. Fry said it tasted like jerky I think.

Where can I read more about this? Frankly I'm a bit surprised that I've never heard about this considering how shocking it sounds.

Wild, isn't it? Hands down my favorite historical fact learned in 2023.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mummy_brown

Wild? Wait until you read about people actually eating mummies and corpses

https://www.nationalgeographic.com/history/article/mummy-eat...

Wow. I like aged cheese but that is a bridge too far.

The things Futurama made me look up on Wikipedia...