A Life After Death: Mummy Brown

Every artist’s palette is quite different — some use just the basics: the primary colors, ivory black and titanium white. Others prefer a wider array — burnt umber, phthalo green, cadmium orange… These days the most varied and brilliant of pigments can be emulated artificially, though it hasn’t always been this way. Paints were once made up of precious stones, minerals, animal products, and really anything with any sort of color to it. Many artists STILL use their bodily fluids as pigment in their work, though its effectiveness in pigmentation is questionable. However, of the ancient paint ingredients, there is one whose usage is most harrowing… and horrifying! This pigment is Mummy Brown. Just as the name would suggest, this particular pigment was made from the finely ground remains of ancient Egyptians.

Before the Art

As one may surmise, the journey to using human remains as art materials did not begin with a long-dead painter shouting ‘Eureka!’ and calling their local archaeologist. Rather, people falsely believed that mummies were embalmed using bitumen, or asphalt, as we more commonly call it. Bitumen was believed to have medicinal properties, though scarcity of supply led 12th century Europeans to use ground mummies to cure anything from a stomach ache to chicken pox. In addition to allegedly containing bitumen, many believed that mummies had magical preservation properties, and helped to spread the belief that ‘life energy’ can be consumed from the flesh of animals or other human beings.

The mummy trade proved to be quite lucrative, though just like bitumen, Egyptian mummies were in limited supply. This led to freshly dead corpses being mummified and ground for use in medicine, some even being specifically prescribed. To think that we were cannibalizing each other as recently as the 1800s!

The Leap to Paint

Just as many other medicines became paint pigments, mummy brown quickly followed suit. The ground flesh produced a rust-like translucent color that many artists revered (though some reported it as cracking or fading easily). One mummy could produce a fair amount of paint, lasting one merchant twenty years of sales. Though, it is difficult for historians to discern just how popular mummy brown was, as testing paint samples has proven futile, due to the large array of recipes that passed for ‘mummy brown’. There was a large amount of discourse about the pigment as its use entered the 1900s, expressed through journals and fiction. It is also apparent that the origin of mummy brown was lost over time, some artists appalled when discovering that mummy brown was comprised of real mummy (namely Edward Burne-Jones) going so far as to bury tubes of the pigment in mourning.

After four centuries of regular use, mummy brown no longer circulated, not only because the public was becoming aware of the historical value of mummies, but because there simply weren’t any left to transform into paint. The last tube was sold in 1964, surprisingly recent by most standards. An artist today wouldn’t have much luck finding a real tube of Mummy, though I’m sure there are tubes waiting patiently on the black market.

The Public History Perspective

Had past generations realized the value of intact mummies, perhaps they would not have eaten or painted with them, just as today we would not consume the artifacts that populate our museums. Had the public of the time been educated in the true value of their medicines and paints, a tube would have sold for more than three euros, a laughable trade for the fruits of three millennia. The recency of Mummy Brown’s discontinuation is also a testament to how recently our value for history has come into vogue. It is my hope that the people of today avoid another Mummy Brown, and put thought into what they consume and trade. Though, in some ways, the ancient Egyptians lost to this fad have been immortalized in galleries all over the world.