The People Who Were Turned Into Paint

less than 1m read

·Nov 10, 2024

There are four people in this painting. Three of them are made out of paint. The fourth is the paint.

The interior of a kitchen was painted in 1815, and like many paintings from that time, one of the colors used in it was mummy Brown, a pigment literally made from the ground up dried flesh of ancient mummies.

Today, we hollow mummies as fragile time capsules, but in the 1700s, there was a thriving mummy trade between Egypt and Europe. Ground up mummy was believed to have mystic healing powers, and the oil paints that could be made from it were highly valued.

So, mummy Brown was used in countless paintings for hundreds of years. It wasn't until the late 1800s that people began to really question its use. The dwindling supply of mummies didn't help either, and so it began to fall out of fashion.

The people who were turned into paint didn't ask to be. What they wanted was immortality, and they may have got what they wanted, but they also got an afterlife they didn't expect. Not one for their personal souls, but one for the anonymous beauty of the rotten, tari darkness.

Anyone can become… [Music]

A message from Sal Khan for the Khan Academy 2016 Annual Report

A Dangerous Night In L.A. | LA 92

View All

What Makes Kurzgesagt So Special?

We’d like to tell you a story about a kurzgesagt video that took us over 1000 hours to create. It all started with a simple idea. We stumbled upon something truly awe-inspiring. A piece of knowledge so important, we wanted to share it with as many people …

🌍 Which Planet is the Closest?

My Very Easy Method Just Speeds Up Naming… Planets. Every Physics classroom has a Solar System line like this. Or… like this. (Sorry, Pluto.) Looking at the line, which planet is closest to Earth: Venus or Mars? To answer, you need first know that, like …

Exponential functions differentiation intro | Advanced derivatives | AP Calculus AB | Khan Academy

What I want to do in this video is explore taking the derivatives of exponential functions. So we’ve already seen that the derivative with respect to x of e to the x is equal to e to the x, which is a pretty amazing thing. One of the many things that make…

JERRY BLOOP REVIEWS: MGS Peacewalker, Alpha Protocol, Crackdown 2, Dragon Quest IX

Shiny Vsauce and the first episode of uninformed video game reviews. A lot of people commented on the fact that Jerry Bloob has a pillow underneath his sweatshirt. Why? Well, he actually has a very rare medical condition that leaves his nipples razor-shar…

Taking and visualizing powers of a complex number | Precalculus | Khan Academy

We’re told to consider the complex number ( z ) is equal to negative one plus ( i ) times the square root of three. Find ( z ) to the fourth in polar and rectangular form. So pause this video and see if you can figure that out. All right, now let’s work …

Animal Survival Technique - Smarter Every Day (T-5)

Hey, it’s me, Destin. We got a lot of rain here in Alabama over the last couple of weeks, and I wanted to show you an interesting survival technique I’ve found in one of the local species. Anyway, you can see all the area behind me used to be a wide ope…

The People Who Were Turned Into Paint

More Articles