'MUMMY' Deemed Disrespectful To The 3,000-Year-Old Dead

The new acceptable word is Mummified Person or Mummified Remains, as the term "Mummy" is considered dehumanizing to non-living people. With the new terms, the museum's visitors can appreciate the remains as former human beings rather than as decoration in the historical building.

The British Museum traced the use of the word Mummy to its colonial era when the English people ruled the world. More than 600 years BC since getting the mummified Egyptian woman Irtyru, a museum in Newcastle, Great North Museum, edited the label on her casket to the new terms.

The British museums aren't the only woke establishments trying not to use Mummies in their vocabularies as Scotland's National Museum joined the trend to become more sensitive to the corpses.

A museum representative explained that the grammatical connotation of the word Mummy remains, but its colloquial meaning has become insulting. The museum managers believe it's dehumanizing to refer to the remains as objects rather than people who once lived on Earth.

Besides the obvious slurry attachment to the slang, museum managers didn't like that the word now represented scary monsters in horror flicks. Hundreds of movies feature a scary character with the moniker Mummy. 

The most popular of those horror flicks is the cult-classic The Mummy which spurred a franchise of several remakes and sequels.

While it's interesting to create those horror flicks, it dehumanizes the real life mummified persons who grace the halls of several museums and the pyramids in Egypt.

Historians trace the word Mummy to the 17th century based on the bitumen used for embalming corpses. It's an Anglicization of the Arabic word, Mummiya (Bitumen).

Preserving corpses with bitumen was as fascinating to the British as the idea of unwrapping said dead bodies. To date, anthropologists still exhume mummified remains from Egypt and unwrap them for study.

Alongside adjusting the terms used to address mummified people, the museums now expound on the information about the person who lived.

Academics believe tracing the history and teaching it at the museums would demystify the idea of mummified remains and stop people from attributing them to real-life monsters.

It's unlikely that'll happen but updating the museum's vocabulary is a step in the right direction.

The Mummy franchise featuring Tom Cruise (2017 reboot), The Scorpion King franchise featuring Dwayne Johnson, Hotel Transylvania, Scooby-Doo! mysteries and Night at the Museum.