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]

Techniques for generating a simple random sample | Study design | AP Statistics | Khan Academy

TIL: Hummingbirds Are the World's Hungriest Birds | Today I Learned

View All

Can Stoics Be Activists? | Q&A #5 | July 2019

Hello everyone! Welcome to the fifth Einzelgänger Q&A. Before the weekend, I reached the 50,000 subscriber mark on this channel. When I started back in January, I’d never had expected that this channel would reach this magic number so quickly or, at a…

Voter turnout | Political participation | US government and civics | Khan Academy

What we’re going to talk about in this video is voter turnout, which is a way of thinking about how many of the people who could vote actually do vote. It’s often expressed as a number, as a percentage, where you have the number who vote over the number o…

Difference between wealth and income | Macroeconomics | Khan Academy

Before talking more about inequality, I think it’s worth talking about the difference between wealth and income. Wealth and income often get confused in conversations about inequality. As you can imagine, these two things move together. You tend to associ…

Michael Burry: How You Should Invest In 2022

Right, we bought basically short 8.4 billion of credit default swaps, um, related to mortgages or financial companies, and I was extremely confident in the outcome. Were your investors as confident? I know for sure that some of them thought I lost my mind…

Medical Reason for Visions? | The Story of God

Ian Ball had never been a religious person. He never really thought about God. But scarring from brain surgery brought on a series of visions that made him question everything. “It’s carried on for about three or four weeks. About how often? Every day. E…

There’s a Bear in My Backyard | Podcast | Overheard at National Geographic

Foreign. It seemed to be happening everywhere this past summer. North of Boston, this is a very popular bear in Wilmington, popping up out of hedges and onto lawns. Near Saint Paul, Minnesota, in the video, you can see kids jumping off the playground equi…

The People Who Were Turned Into Paint

More Articles