European painters used ground-up mummies for centuries.
The pigment mummy brown was made of pulverised Egyptian mummies, white pitch and myrrh. Sales are documented from 1712 at a Paris shop called "À la momie". When Edward Burne-Jones learned in 1881 what was in his tube, he buried it in the garden. The last supplier ran out of stock in 1964.
Useful: Studying materials turns up stories that appear in no catalogue text.
Source: en.wikipedia.org