Pigments of the Past: How the Ancients Coloured Their World

Students explore painted artefacts at the Museum and discover the science behind how the ancient Greeks ground, mixed and distilled paints and dyes from a variety of natural materials like saffron, lapis lazuli and sandstone. Students touch and observe these ingredients, and experiment making their own ancient egg tempera paints that were used to create murals in Mycenaean Greece, ancient Egypt, Babylonia and China.