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]

Homeroom with Sal - Thursday, June 4

Ray CNBC Squawk Box Singapore - The 5 Big Forces

View All

Conditions for a t test about a mean | AP Statistics | Khan Academy

Sunil and his friends have been using a group messaging app for over a year to chat with each other. He suspects that, on average, they send each other more than 100 messages per day. Sunil takes a random sample of seven days from their chat history and r…

Ideology and social policy | US government and civics | Khan Academy

In this off-white color, I have a handful of statements that you might hear folks say, especially in the United States. What we’re going to think about is, are these statements that you would typically hear from a liberal? I’m gonna make a little key here…

Military Father | No Man Left Behind

My task was to take out one of the most high-value strategic command and control targets in Belgrade, the capital city of the former Republic of Yugoslavia. I felt absolutely totally confident that I was as well trained and well prepared as possible for a…

Mule Mayhem | Live Free or Die

Oh, oh, damn it! Oh, God damn it! Hold, hold, hold! Damn it! Goddamn mules! Hold! No, you hold! Too much traffic, motorcycles, bicyclists—everything was too much for the mule. And once he started plunging down that hill and the jugs were hitting the bush…

Black Women and the Suffrage Movement | 100 Years After Women's Suffrage

Good afternoon! I’m Deborah Adam Simmons, Executive Editor for History and Culture at National Geographic. I am thrilled that we will have a conversation this afternoon with historian Martha Jones and writer Michelle Duster about the role of African-Ameri…

Graphical limit where function undefined

So we have the graph of ( y = f(x) ) right over here. What we want to do is figure out the limit of ( f(x) ) as ( x ) approaches -4. So, what does that mean? Well, a limit is saying, “What is my function approaching as the input of that function approach…

The People Who Were Turned Into Paint

More Articles