The 19th-century use of ancient Egyptian papyrus for wrapping groceries

History is basically one long, messy dumpster dive. In the 1800s, the West treated ancient Egypt like a giant clearance sale where "priceless" artifacts were just clutter.

There was such a surplus of papyrus that it lost its magic. These 3,000-year-old scrolls were sold by the ton to be used as cheap butcher paper.

Imagine walking home with sausages wrapped in an ancient tax record. It wasn't "sacred history"—it was just a sturdy way to keep your groceries from leaking.

Hold on, where did they actually find enough scrolls to sell by weight?

They didn't find a library; they found a giant, ancient landfill. Egypt is a dry sandbox that preserves everything, and 19th-century explorers were basically grave robbers with better outfits.

They hit the jackpot with 'mummy pits'—mass graves filled with thousands of bodies. Since papyrus was the ancient world's version of bubble wrap, it was used to stuff mummy cavities or layered to make cheap, cardboard-like coffins.

To the people digging them up, these weren't sacred artifacts. They were just a raw material buried under the sand, waiting to be harvested and sold as scrap.

What happened to the actual bodies once they stripped the 'bubble wrap' off?

They didn't just leave them to tan. In the 19th-century scavenger economy, a mummy was a Swiss Army knife. If you weren't using the papyrus for paper, you were likely grinding the person into fertilizer or art supplies.

Artists even used a pigment called 'Mummy Brown'—literally pulverized ancient people. You could be admiring a classic painting today that’s technically a very thin, very expensive graveyard.

From fertilizer to 'mummy coal' for steam engines, the era viewed the dead as a cheap, combustible resource rather than sacred ancestors.

Wait, so there are famous paintings out there made of actual dead people?

Absolutely. It was a staple on the 19th-century palette. If you’re looking at a masterpiece from that era, there’s a decent chance you’re staring at a "recycled" Pharaoh.

Some artists were oblivious. When painter Edward Burne-Jones found out his paint was made of people, he held a literal funeral in his backyard to bury his remaining tubes.

The trend only died when they ran out of mummies. By the 1960s, suppliers couldn't find enough "raw material" to keep the corpse-paint business alive.

Did they seriously just stop painting when the bodies ran out?

They didn't stop painting; they just got less "organic." Modern "Mummy Brown" is usually just a mix of iron oxides and clay. It’s much more stable and, thankfully, significantly less haunted.

The original stuff was actually a technical nightmare. Because it contained fats and resins from the embalming process, the paint would often crack or darken unevenly over time. It was a literal "dying" medium.

Today’s synthetic version gives you that same earthy glow without the ethical baggage of grinding up someone’s ancestor just to get the perfect shade of tan.