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]

Creative algebra at work | Algebra 1 | Khan Academy

Announcing O'Leary Fine Wines

View All

40 AI Founders Discuss Current Artificial Intelligence Technology

What is the most maybe unexpected way that you use AI in your regular life? Yeah, I don’t know if I should say this, but uh, writing speeches for weddings. Yeah, we both set our answering machines to our boy’s spot. “Hey, how’s it going?” “Oh, it’s th…

The Life of a Miner In Colombia | Mine Hunters

Meanwhile, outside, Fred is using his experience in large commercial gold mines to build a system that can protect the area around the mine. So basically, what’s happening here is we’ve got a lot of water drainage out of the mine, and with the water’s co…

Physical and chemical changes | Chemical reactions | AP Chemistry | Khan Academy

So what we have are three different pictures of substances undergoing some type of change. What we’re going to focus on in this video is classifying things as either being physical changes or chemical changes. You might have already thought about this or …

The Book Bush Was Reading on 9/11

I’m often asked why I have this book. Well, this book is a piece of American History. It is the book that George W. Bush was reading when 9⁄11 happened. That morning, he was at M. E. Booker Elementary School in Sarasota, Florida, following along as studen…

Refugees Welcomed in New York | Explorer

[music playing] HOST: Of approximately 61,000 residents in Utica, New York, nearly 11,000 are immigrants and refugees. And 450 or more arrive here each year. Utica was a manufacturing town in the 1970s and 1980s. Some of our factories began to leave, and…

Going Inside MEGA Rehab | Explorer

Do ter de made a token attempt to increase capacity by building a mega rehab facility on a military base about four hours north of Manila. Our crew is the first ever to be allowed inside to film. It’s a big complex divided into four phases. Each phase can…

The People Who Were Turned Into Paint

More Articles