For centuries European painters reached for a rich, transparent brown pigment called Mummy Brown, also known as Egyptian Brown or caput mortuum, and it was made from exactly what the name suggests: ground-up mummified remains mixed with myrrh and white pitch. This deep dive traces the entire life cycle of the color, from Egyptian and Guanche mummies imported as raw material, through the medieval apothecary trade where powdered mummy was prescribed for everything from dysentery to toothache, to Paris art shops like the one named A la Momie selling it beside linseed oil by 1712.

We unpack the mumia translation error that turned a search for bitumen into the consumption of human flesh, the counterfeit industry that baked fresh corpses with asphaltum to fake antiquity, and the works historians suspect contain the pigment, including Delacroix's  ...