New-York tribune. [volume] (New York [N.Y.]) 1866-1924, 1903-12-20

Mummy powdered mummy-makeS one OF the
best and most popular colors used by artists.
Every large dealer in oil paints sells powdered
mummy and almost every manufacturer of pig
ments has a mummy department, where, in
spice laden atmosphere, amid surroundings
picturesque and grewsome, young men and
women grind up the dried bodies of Egyptian
Processes and priests mix the powder with
poppy oil and bottle it for the market in little
tubes of tin.
This business of making paint out Of mum
mics is of long standing but it is now threat
ened with destruction. For the supply of mum
mics is daily growing scarcer, while the demand
for them increases If, then, for the benefit of
the museums and people of the future, any
mummies at all are to be preserved, the COM
merce in them must at once cease. That is the
view which the government of Egypt is taking,
and the governments of France and England are
supporting her. In the London and Paris news
papers have appeared of late number of arti-
cles urging the instant prohibition all over the
world of the mummy paint industry.
These articles in the newspapers were the first
announcement that many persons had that such
thing as the mummy paint industry existed.
Therefore, the articles occasioned a great deal
of curiosity. and men and women, stopping in
shops devoted to artists supplies, said:
do you sell paint called mummy"
Yes; this is it."
We'll. And here is the name marked on the
tube. too! Is this paint really made out of
mummies?"
Yes; of ground mummy and poppy OIL"
1T is very strange. 1t is grewsome. 1t is
horrible and sad and fascinating"
The mummy paint industry, undisturbed by
all this public interest and all this governmental
condemnation, moves onward calmly. The old
masters, when they desired to give subtle
brown tint to a womans hair, dipped their
brushes in a mummy's powdered dust and
painted brown hair of that bright sort which
turns to pure gold in the sunlight Mummies
figure in the daybooks and the ledgers of every
paint factory Turn to their stock accounts, and
these are common entries:
10 10 h mummy Thebesj at So to
To Il Id mummy tMemphis at So 50.............. ~
In a Philadelphia factory, the other day. a
mummy had just arrived, and they busy
grinding it, with poppy oil, into smooth
brown paste. The work went in a small
room that smeled of myrrh and cassia- The
mummy case stood in a corner. 1t was deco
rated with small figures in red and green and
gold and black and the carved and painted
face upon it imposing and grave. Beside
it a young girl. bending a small table.
filled tubes with powdered mummy. There lay
at her feet a great bundle of faded yellow
linen, the wrappings of the mummy, which
numbered hundreds of yards.
A young man was grinding on a stone slab
bits of mummy The implement he used was a
rounded stone with a fiat base The mummy's
head lay beside him and near it a few
bones. Now and then the young moistened
the dark powder on the slab with a few drops
of poppy oil.
This mummy said the manager, will make
enough paint to last two years The paint is
called mummy-simply that. The demand for
it is not enormous. 1t is not used to paint
bridges with you know.
NO one knows just Why powdered mummies
should make a brown OF unique excellence