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]

The Future of The Past

How to Implement AI in Your Classroom

View All

The Mystery of Queen Nefertiti | Lost Treasures of Egypt

[music playing] NARRATOR: Nestling on the east bank of the Nile, Nefertiti’s capital city covered over 3,000 acres, and was home to up to 50,000 people. What is now barren landscape was once one of the greatest cities in the ancient world. And from these…

Graphical limit at point discontinuity

So here we have the graph ( y = G(x) ). We have a little point discontinuity right over here at ( x = 7 ), and what we want to do is figure out what is the limit of ( G(x) ) as ( x ) approaches 7. So essentially, we say, “Well, what is the function appro…

The FED Just RESET The Housing Market

What’s up, Graham? It’s guys here, and you’re not going to believe this. In the middle of a real estate slowdown, a possible 30% hit to home prices, and seven percent mortgage rates, a brand new policy was just released that would loosen credit score requ…

Recognizing common 3D shapes

So, I have five three-dimensional shapes over here, and I also have five names for them. What I want you to do is pause this video and think about which of these shapes is a square pyramid, which of these is a rectangular prism, which one is a triangular …

Interpreting expected value | Probability & combinatorics | Khan Academy

We’re told a certain lottery ticket costs two dollars, and the back of the ticket says the overall odds of winning a prize with this ticket are 1 to 50. The expected return for this ticket is 95 cents. Which interpretations of the expected value are corr…

Why Are So Many Starfish Dying? | National Geographic

From Mexico all the way to Alaska, there has been a massive die-off of sea stars. The estimates are in the tens to hundreds of millions of sea stars that have died in the last couple of years. It’s one of the largest mortality events associated with a dis…

The People Who Were Turned Into Paint

More Articles