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]

First Week of Medical School VLOG *in person*

Amber Heard Cross-Examined by Johnny Depp's Lawyer | Part One - Day 17 (Depp v Heard)

View All

Using a P-value to make conclusions in a test about slope | AP Statistics | Khan Academy

Alicia took a random sample of mobile phones and found a positive linear relationship between their processor speeds and their prices. Here is computer output from a least squares regression analysis on her sample. So just to be clear what’s going on: sh…

The social contract | Foundations of American democracy | US government and civics | Khan Academy

Before we dive deep into our study of government and politics, it’s worth asking a fundamental question, and that’s whether we even need government. Or why do we need government? I encourage you to pause this video and think about this. Do you think we ne…

The World Has Changed! Here are the NEW RULES

The world of today and that of tomorrow is radically different than that of yesterday. We’re going through the biggest transfer of wealth and the biggest societal and cultural change in modern history. By the end of this video, you’ll understand what’s on…

Where Do Great Startup Ideas Come From? – Dalton Caldwell and Michael Seibel

In all three of these cases, these folks had the problem they had experience with, and in hindsight, there was an obvious opportunity to make something 10x better. But most people thought they were idiots, and that’s probably the overarching theme. They h…

Flora, Fauna, Funga | Documentary | National Geographic Society

(Tranquil music) (Birds chirping) - [Giuliana] Without fungi, no plant could live outside of water. Without fungi, nothing would decompose. (Tranquil music continues) (Birds chirping) Most of the fluxes of nutrients on our planet would not exist. Basicall…

Misconceptions About Falling Objects

Let’s say Jack holds both balls above his head and then he drops them at exactly the same time. What do you expect to see? Well, they’re going to hit the ground at the same time. I expect them to both land at the same time. The same time, same time! This…

The People Who Were Turned Into Paint

More Articles