By examining the materials and symbols present in these ornaments, we can come away with a deeper understanding of the complex ideas that guided the artists, as well as the hopes and beliefs of those who first wore this jewelry in ancient times.ĭr. Buchner lamented in 1898 in Scientific American that “mumia,” as a color and a medicine, “is becoming more and more scarce, so that it is difficult to supply the demand, for the excavations are now permitted only under official supervision the good mummies found are preserved for museums.Sacred Adornment: Jewelry as Belief in Ancient Egypt, a stunning new exhibition at Glencairn Museum, explores religious beliefs as expressed in the Museum’s collection of ancient Egyptian jewelry. In fact, one reason for mummy brown’s demise was simply a lack of mummies. So we all went out and helped-according to the rites of Mizraim and Memphis.”įew fellow Victorians had such respect for the dead.

His nephew, the young Rudyard Kipling, recalled in his autobiography how his uncle “descended in broad daylight with a tube of ‘Mummy Brown’ in his hand, saying that he had discovered it was made of dead Pharaohs and we must bury it accordingly. When Pre-Raphaelite painter Edward Burne-Jones realized the paint’s corporeal source, he decided to ritually inter his pigment. But not all artists were comfortable with its origins. Sellers of such materials made little secret of its human composition-that exoticism was part of its allure. Since many pigments developed from medicine, at some point someone reconsidered eating the mummy and using it to color their art instead. A fourteenth-century Italian manuscript recently on view in Medieval Monsters: Terrors, Aliens, Wonders at the Morgan Library & Museum in New York illustrated a mummy alongside a mandrake root as potential cures. The mummy trade in Europe was centuries old, with ancient embalmed bodies long employed as medicine.

Blue gold the mummy