Ancient Egyptians Were Putting Some Strange Things into Their Paint

Protein traces reveal practical workshop recipes and a connection to the god Ptah.

Ancient Egyptian artists created images meant to endure for eternity with decidedly earthly ingredients: boiled animal tissues, eggs, grains and the remnants of processed seeds.

Now scientists have identified an especially surprising addition to that ancient workshop palette by reading proteins preserved in microscopic samples of coffins and tomb paintings. They found glues derived from several kinds of animals alongside sesame and moringa, a plant with a striking connection to Ptah, the ancient Egyptian patron god of craftsmen.

Basically, archaeologists figured out the recipes behind Egyptian paints. But was it all practical, or did it have a religious meaning?

A molecular inventory of an ancient workshop

For centuries, the brilliant pigments of Egyptian art have received much of the scientific attention. But pigment is only part of a painting. Ancient artists also needed substances that made powdered colors stick to a surface, prepared the layer beneath them or glued parts of an object together. That part received far less interest.

Animal glue was already a leading suspect. Egyptians could make it by heating collagen-rich tissues such as hides, bones and connective tissue in water. But suspecting a method is one thing, proving it is another. And figuring out which animals were used is even more challenging.

The new study, published August 26 in Science Advances, approached that question using paleoproteomics — the analysis of proteins surviving in ancient materials. The team examined 28 microsamples from 14 painted objects dating from about 1425 BCE to 400 CE. The objects came from the British Museum in London, the Medelhavsmuseet in Stockholm and the Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek in Copenhagen.

Instead of looking for a predetermined ingredient, researchers used mass spectrometry to break proteins into smaller fragments called peptides. Those fragments can be more revealing than proteins, acting like biological fingerprints, sometimes revealing not merely that an object contains animal glue, but what animal produced it.

It turns out, it was mostly cattle. But the researchers also detected collagen associated with horses, donkeys and sheep or goats, as well as proteins that could derive from certain antelope relatives. Some samples contained mixtures from several animals.

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So, there wasn’t one universal recipe. Different artisans may have had different styles and different available materials. But the mass spectrometer began finding proteins that did not come from animals at all.

Sesame, moringa and a god of craftsmen

Researchers detected seed-storage proteins from sesame in both a roughly 3,300-year-old fragment of the famous Tomb of Nebamun paintings and a much later Greco-Roman wooden coffin. In the coffin’s red paint, they found proteins from Moringa oleifera, the drumstick tree.

This was a bit of a surprise.

“This is the first molecular evidence of the presence and use of materials from these two plants in painted artifacts from ancient Egypt,” lead author Clara Granzotto told Chemical & Engineering News.

The researchers don’t think the sesame or moringa oil was used as ordinary paint binder. Chemical tests indicated that protein formed the dominant organic material, accompanied by traces of oil. The team instead proposes that artists could have used a protein-rich by-product of seed processing — perhaps material left behind after extracting valuable oil.

So, the painting workshop may have been more than just a simple workshop; it was probably part of a larger ancient economy. Sesame and moringa could provide oils for food, medicine, cosmetics, mummification and other uses. What remained after processing might still have been valuable to a craftsman.

But the moringa is particularly interesting.

The tree had a symbolic association with Ptah, a deity closely connected with craftsmen and creative activity. An ancient epithet described him as “Ptah Who is Under His Moringa Tree,” and a seal dating to roughly 1390 to 1352 BCE depicts the association. The study’s authors suggest that finding moringa in an artwork could potentially help explain that link — or that artisans might have incorporated the material as an act of dedication or protection.

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More Egyptian artwork will need to be tested before scientists know whether moringa appears systematically in particular objects, places or religious contexts.

It’s still early days for this type of study, but it’s a tantalizing window to the past. Egyptian paintings have preserved gods, rulers and rituals for thousands of years. Now the molecules holding those images together are preserving another story: the hands-on chemistry of the people who made them.

The study was published in Science Advances.