Mummy Tales

Last week, a follower of this blog, Christine Debrosky, wrote and asked if I had ever read anything about a pigment called, mummy yellow, or mummy brown. Well, I have, and this is probably the most bizarre and creepy pigment story yet.

In her book, Colors, Anne Verichon says that in ancient Egypt mummy yellow was sacred because it was made from real mummies. In the embalming process resin, pitch, bitumen soaked linen was used to wrap the bodies for preservation. The dessicated flesh of the embalmed bodies was later ground into a powder using parts of the body. Artists revered this color for its shadowy yellow tints. It was also used as a medicine during the 12 century AD by European apothecaries.

Victoria Finlay tells similar tales in her book, Color, A Natural History of the Palette. She actually quotes from an earlier treatise on pigments by Rosamund Harley, Artists’ Pigments, 1600 to 1835. Harley quotes from the journal of an English traveler who in 1586 visited a mass grave in Egypt. “He was let down into a pit by a rope, and strolled around the corpes, which were illuminated by torchlight. He was a cool customer, and described how he “broke of all parts of the bodies….and brought home divers heads, hands, arms, and feet”….it goes on, but you get the idea.

Finlay continues to say by 1712 in Britain mummy colors were widely used and sold in shops. George Field, a British colorman relates getting a shipment of “mummy” from Sir William Beechey in 1809. Upon arrival, it was a mass containing rib-bones etc.—smelling of garlic and ammonia. The substance easily ground into a pigment and had a pasty feel to it.

Natural Pigments makes a product to simulate mummy brown called, bauxite mummy. It contains iron minerals and mostly hematite, no real mummies involved.