NATRON MUMMIFICATION SKIN

It had a variety of consistencies, from semiliquid (known today as pissasphalt) to semisolid (bitumen). Natural bitumen was abundant in the ancient Middle East, where it formed in geological basins from the remains of tiny plants and animals.

NATRON MUMMIFICATION SKIN

Other uses included the treatment of cataracts, toothaches, and skin diseases. In his 1st-century text Natural History, Roman naturalist Pliny the Elder recommends ingesting bitumen with wine to cure chronic coughs and dysentery or to combine it with vinegar to dissolve and remove clotted blood. It is viscous when heated but hardens when dried, making it useful for stabilizing broken bones and creating poultices for rashes. (The book of Genesis lists it as one of the materials used in the Tower of Babel.) The ancients also used bitumen to protect tree trunks and roots from insects and to treat an array of human ailments. It’s a naturally occurring hydrocarbon that has been used in construction in the Middle East since ancient times. Today we think of bitumen as asphalt, the black, sticky substance that coats our roads. Megan Rosenbloom, director of the Death Salon. Why did Europeans believe in the medicinal value of the mummy? The answer probably comes down to a string of misunderstandings. Mummies could be found on apothecary shelves in the form of bodies broken into pieces or ground into powder. The eating of Egyptian mummies reached its peak in Europe by the 16th century. These practices, however strange, are just some of the many ways people have made something useful out of death. In later centuries unmummified corpses were passed off as mummy medicine, and eventually some Europeans no longer cared whether the bodies they were ingesting had been mummified or not. Since the 12th century, Europeans had been eating Egyptian mummies as medicine.

(On discovering the source of the pigment, Burne-Jones is said to have been horrified and felt compelled to bury his reserves of mummy brown.)īut it wasn’t just artists who were using ground-up bodies. Nineteenth-century painters Eugène Delacroix, Sir Lawrence Alma-Tadema, and Edward Burne-Jones were just a few of the artists who found the pigment useful for shading, shadows, and, ironically, flesh tones. In 1915 a London pigment dealer commented that one mummy would produce enough pigment to last him and his customers 20 years. From the 16th to the 19th century many painters favored the pigment, and it remained available into the 20th century, even as supplies dwindled. Scholars believe he relied heavily on a popular pigment of his time-mummy brown-a concoction made from ground-up Egyptian mummies. If art historians and conservators are right about Interior of a Kitchen, Martin Drölling’s painting from 1815, the artist had help from a surprising source-the grave.

Natron mummification