Artists painted with a pigment literally ground from Egyptian mummies.

Tomb of Memnon from the 20th dynasty in the Valley of the Kings, Egypt
Credit: © Abrill_—iStock/Getty Images
Author Bess Lovejoy
October 6, 2026

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Among the many indignities inflicted upon ancient Egyptian mummies, being squeezed from a tube onto an artist’s palette may be one of the strangest. For centuries, European artists used a brown pigment known as “mummy brown” or “Egyptian brown,” made by grinding up material taken from mummified human and animal remains.

Although mummy brown is sometimes presented as a 19th-century novelty in Europe, its history stretches back centuries further. Some accounts of mummy pigment date to the 12th century CE, although its use as an oil paint pigment began around the end of the 16th century. Recipes varied, but some called for mummy material — including flesh, bones, wrappings, or substances scraped from inside the body — to be ground with a nut oil. The resulting warm, translucent brown was particularly useful for painting shadows, flesh tones, and glazes.

Part of the pigment’s color probably came from the dark substances used during embalming. These were long assumed to include large quantities of bitumen, also known as pitch — an oily, black petroleum product that oozed up from the earth in some parts of the Middle East, and whose name in Arabic, mūmiyā, gave us the term “mummy.” While many mummies did contain bitumen, other resins, fats, waxes, and materials used for mummification also darkened with age and likely added depth to the pigment.

Mummy brown became especially fashionable among European artists in the 18th and 19th centuries, although some may not have realized exactly what it contained. According to the writer Rudyard Kipling, the Pre-Raphaelite painter Edward Burne-Jones (Kipling’s uncle) was so horrified to learn the truth in 1881 that he ceremonially buried his tube in the garden. Growing respect for mummies’ archaeological and cultural value, dwindling supplies, and the pigment’s unpredictable quality eventually brought the product to an end in the 20th century. Paints sold as mummy brown today merely imitate its earthy color — no ancient Egyptians required.

By the Numbers

Did you know?

Mummies were once sold as medicine.

Long before European artists painted with mummies, patients swallowed them. The practice grew partly from confusion over the word mumia, which referred to bitumen, the naturally occurring petroleum product once prized for its supposed healing properties. Because many Egyptian mummies were blackened and believed to contain bitumen, people began attributing the same medicinal powers to the bodies themselves. By the 12th century, powdered mummy was being sold in Europe as a treatment for bruises, bleeding, and numerous other ailments. Demand eventually inspired counterfeiters to pass off recently deceased people as ancient mummies. Suspicions that mummy medicine could spread plague helped discredit the medicine, although its use lingered into the 18th century.

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