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]

how to master your emotions | emotional intelligence

Monarch Butterflies Get Tiny Radio Trackers | Expedition Raw

View All

Introduction to integral calculus | Accumulation and Riemann sums | AP Calculus AB | Khan Academy

So I have a curve here that represents ( y ) is equal to ( f(x) ), and there’s a classic problem that mathematicians have long thought about: how do we find the area under this curve, maybe under the curve and above the x-axis, and let’s say between two b…

An Empty City is Eerie Magic

[Wind blowing] I’ve been inside, locked down for… eight months at this point. And, while I’m naturally an indoor sort of person, you can get too much of a good thing. So, I bought this bike for allowed outdoor exercise and to do some exploration to bring …

How Does a Quantum Computer Work?

A classical computer performs operations using classical bits, which can be either zero or one. Now in contrast, a quantum computer uses quantum bits or qubits. And they can be both zero and one at the same time. And it is this that gives a quantum comput…

The Changing World Order Has Just Begun | How To Prepare

What’s up, guys? It’s Graham here. So throughout the last week, there’s been a new topic gaining a lot of attention with over two and a half million views over these last few days. It has to do with the video posted by Ray Dalio titled Principles for Dea…

Light dependent reactions actors

In a previous video, we gave an overview of the light-dependent reactions, which are essentially occurring across the thylakoid membranes. Right, and we zoomed in on one, and we saw, okay, we have some energy from light exciting the electrons within the c…

Help Khan Academy create lessons on US Government!

[Laughter] Hi! I’m a founder of the KH Academy, and I’m Kim, KH Academy’s US History fellow. And it being July, the month of our nation’s birth, as well as an election year — a kind of, uh, not so exciting election year — we thought we would excite the… w…

The People Who Were Turned Into Paint

More Articles